P R 







Poems 



IRIS 





Book. 'P^ :iEl 

Cop>T!ght N^ ' ^ > ^ 



CCPXRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



POEMS BY 

IRIS TREE 



THE author returns thanks for 
permission to use in this col- 
lection of her poems, those which 
have appeared in Poetry, Vanity 
Fair and the "Wheels" Anthology. 




HEAD OF IRIS TREE 



By Jacob Epstein 




Poems 

by 

Iris Tree 



Curtis Moffa.t 



NcwYorkJohn Lane CoMPAMy 

LONDON: John Lane The Bodle/head 



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Copyright, iqiq, 
John Lane Company 



Press of J. J. Little & Ives Company 
New York, U. S. A. 



©CI.A515932 
JUN 13 !9!9 



CONTENTS 

ROCKETS AND ASHES 



^ 



"You Preach to Me of Laws, You Tie My Limbs' 
"We Are the Caretakers of Empty Houses" . ^^ 
"From Far Away the Lost Adventures Gleam" 
"Give Me, O God, the Power of Laughter Still 
"Winding Down the Street in Wearied Gaiety 
"Tranquillity Stirred by a Sudden Spasm 

"I Could Explain" 

"I Feel in Me a Manifold Desire" . 

"Silence" ^^ 

"I Should Like to Say to the World'' 
"You Pass as in a Drugged Delirium" 
"O Faces that Look so Coldly at Me" 
"I See Myself in Many Different Dresses 
"There are Songs Enough of Love, of Joy, of 

Grief" 

" How Often, When the Thought of Suicide 
"It is Still Something to have Cheated God" 
"What Words that Move on Wings in a Long 

Drift" 

"I Think Myself" ^^ 

"The Adored, Wild, Strange, Irresistible" 

A "Rose ,•••••*' 

"Like Flocks of Tired Birds When Autumn 

Comes" 

"Oh, Just Beyond the Curve of Ideal Quest 

"Ah! You, from the Small High-Walled Acre of 

Your Lives" 



PAGE 
II 

12 
13 
14 
15 
17 
18 

19 

20 

21 

22 

23 
24 

25 
27 
28 

29 
30 
31 

32 

33 

34 

35 



ROCKETS AND ASHES (Continued) 

PAGE 

"Mouth of the Dust I Kiss, Corruption Absolute" 36 
"The Curtains are Drawn as though it still were 

Night" ......... 37 

Black Velvet 38 

Nerves 39 

"My Pain has All the Patience of a Nun" . . 40 

"The Scandal-Monger After All is Right" . . 41 
"Woods of Brown Gloom Sombring with the 

Hush of Death" 42 

"I Feel So Much Alone" .43 

The Complex Life 44 

"Shall We Be Christened Poets, Children of God" 46 

"When I Am Weary at the Antic Chance" . . 47 

Moods 48 

SMOKE 

"Now is the Evening Dipped Knee-Deep in Blood" 53 

" Blow Upon Blow They Bruise the Daylight Wan " 54 

"A Ragged Drummer Rides Along the Street" . 56 

Zeppelins 58 

"O Flattery, Imposture, Battle Show" ... 62 
"What Will Happen to the Beggar, and the Sinner, 

AND THE Sad" 63 

"If I Were What I Would Be, and Could Break" 64 

Holy Russia 65 

"How Deeply Nurtured is Your Foolishness" . 67 

"Of All Who Died in Silence Far Away" ... 68 

"And Afterwards, When Honour Has Made Good" 69 

"Pity the Slain that Laid Away Their Lives" . 70 
vi 



FLAME 



"You Have Understood so Little of Me, and My 

Adoration" 

"Lulled are the Dazzling Colours of the Day" 
"Washed at My Feet by the Curded Foam of 

Sluggish, Waves" 

"My Poems Cannot Laugh. They are the Voice" 
"On the Hill There is a Tavern, Long-Loved, 

Well-Remembered" 

"Oh Canst Thou Not Hear in My Heart All Its 

Whispering Fears" 

"As in the Silence the Clear Moonlight Drips" . 
"I Can but Give Thee Unsubstantial Things" 
"I Have No Other Friend BUT Thee" . . . . 

"Bodies Heaving Like Waves" 

"Your Face to Me is Like a Beautiful City" 
"Oh ! Why Will You Not Let Me Love You " . 

"My Devotion Kneels TO You" 92 

Islands 93 

"Many Things I'd Find TO Charm You" ... 94 



75 

78 
79 

80 

81 

83 

84 

85 
88 
89 
90 



LAMPLIGHT AND STARLIGHT 

Lamp-posts 

London 

"Slowly the Pale Feet of Morning" 
"What Have I to Do With Them" 
"Among the Crumbling Arches of Decay' 
"As A Nun's Face from Her Black Draperies' 
"The Sun is Lord of Life and Colour" 

Bahama Islands 

Thoughts of London .... 



97 

98 
100 

lOI 

103 

105 
106 
107 
108 



Vll 



LAMPLIGHT AND STARLIGHT (Continued) 



PAGE 



Streets 109 

"Laughter and Singing Come With the Morning" 113 

"In the Night I Hear My Loneliness Calling" . 1 14 

Sunday 115 

"The Leaves are Singing, and the Sea" . . .116 

"How Soundly Sleepeth the Fool" . . . • 117 
"Moonlit Lilacs Under the Window" . . .118 

"Old Woman Forever Sitting" 119 

"Loneliness I Love" 120 

^^I Met an Indian 121 

"From the Fathomless Depth of My Boredom" . 124 

"Lolling in Snow, Like Kings in Ermine Coats" 125 
"The Roots of Our Longing are Probing the 

Heart of Night" 126 

Vahdah 127 

"Starlight Silences" 128 

"The Mountain IS AN Emperor" 130 

"I Know What Happiness Is" 131 

"Long Hath the Pen Lain Idle in My Hand" . 133 

"I Lay My Heart on A Stone" 134 

"The Cold Light Steals Into My Soul" . . . 13S 

"The Caravans OF Spring are IN the Town" . . 136 

"I Dread the Beauty of Approaching Spring" . 137 

To My Father 139 

To My Mother 140 

'London Grows Sad at Evening" .... 142 

Ah! THE Spring 143 

The Undertone of the Volga Boat Song . . 144 



viu 



ROCKETS AND ASHES 




You preach to me of laws, you tie my limbs 
With rights and wrongs and arguments of good, 
You choke my songs and fill my mouth with hymns, 
You stop my heart and turn it into wood. 

I serve not God, but make my Idol fair 

From clay of brown earth, painted bright with blood, 
Dressed in sweet flesh and wonder of wild hair 

By Beauty's fingers to her changing mood. 

The long line of the sea, the straight horizon, 
The toss of flowers, the prance of milky feet, 

And moonlight clear as glass my great religion, 
And sunrise falling on the quiet street. 

The coloured crowd, the unrestrained, the gay, 

And lovers in the secret sheets of night 
Trembling like instruments of music, till the day 

Stands marvelling at their sleeping bodies white. 

Age creeps upon your timid little faces 

Beneath each black umbrella sly and slow, 

Proud in the unimportance of your places 
You sit in twilight prophesying woe. 

So dim and false and grey, take my compassion, 

I from my pageant golden as the day 
Pity your littleness from all my passion. 

Leave you my sins to weep and whine away 1 

1914 



n 



WE are the caretakers of empty houses, 
The moon leans her slender body against the door, 
But the lock, is jarred with rust. 
The sun looks in through the window, 
But its closed shutters are as blinded eyes. 
Our souls are full of dead and beautiful things 
Like bowls of potpourri, 
A dust of petals 
Rustling through the tired fingers of a ghost. 

1918 



13 



FROM far away the lost adventures gleam, 
The print of childhood's feet that dance and run, 
The love of her who showed me to the sun 
In triumph of creation, who did seem 
With vivid spirit like a rainbow stream 
To paint the shells, young blossoms, one by one 
Each strange and delicate toy, whose hands have spun 
The woven cloth of wonder like a dream . . . 
The row of soldiered books, authority 
Sharp as the scales I strummed upon the keys. 
The priest who damned the things I dared not praise, 
Rebellion, love made sad with mystery — 
And like a firefly through the twilit trees 
Romance, the golden play-boy of my days. 

1917 



13 



GIVE me, O God, the power of laughter still, 
I shall have need of humour, deftest foil 
Against the army of infuriated pride, 
Against the shields of reason, and the spears 
Of savage moments, sharp-edged bitterness; 
Against the blazoned armour of intolerance. 
And all the flags of sentiment waved aloft. . . . 

Love, Humour, and Rebellion, go with me. 

Three musketeers of faithful following. 

We will fear nothing. — Is not laughter brave. 

That unconcerned goes rippling through despair? 

Is not rebellion brave, that fiercely moves 

Against the buttressed prisons of the world? 

And is not love the bravest of them all. 

So frail to hold his white hands up to Heaven 

While the red fists are threatening all around, 

And hate is beating on the battledrums? 

As d'Artagnan upon a starved grey horse 

Goes singing ballads on adventurous roads, 

I ride my fancy blithely into danger 

To throw my gauntlet at the feet of pride 

And stick my roses in the cap of Love. . . . 

1916 



14 



WINDING down the street in wearied gaiety, the barrel- 
organ dribbled out its song 
Merged with the thud of feet forever dallying indifferent 

and indefinite along. 
The houses stood like rows of cripples, some paralysed, 

some hunch-backed and some bent with age. 
They seemed at war, their chimneys threatening, their 

brows hung heavy in a sombre rage. 
Crab-like the children crawled, while always hammering 

above their heads the scolding shrewish tongue; 
They grew as bloodless flowers unflourishing, waxen and 

pale from out the dust and dung. 
Above I saw the strip of sunset fluttering, even as washed- 
out rags upon the line, 
I listened to the sparrows twittering, and the hours ticking 

in a slow decline. 
Then beaded on the hem of evening, the coloured lights 

were threaded here and there, 
Till proud with sweets and plumes and oranges, the shops 

grew brilliant in the tinsel glare. 
Grey was the death-bed of the twilight, shuddering the 

faint hands of the day stretched to the night. 
Fending it off, or feebly wavering over the pallid glints of 

stolen light. 
And grey the faces that were gathering among the fallen 

ashes of the day, 
And red the faces, yellow, flickering, under the lamps upon 

the long highway. 
And some were gashed with smiles, and quaint grimaces of 

hate and pain and hunger and despair, 
And some wore coloured hats and meek frivolities, limp 

ribbons, and false pansies in their hair, 
But all were cold, and all seemed passionless; there shone 

no zest or splendour in their lives. 
Nor hope in anything but holidays, or watching funerals, 

or taking wives. 
15 



I dared not think, for truth rose horrible, slapping the face 
with coarse uncaring hand. 

But like them cheated into merriment, I wilfully refused to 
understand; 

Turned me away from wan-eyed poverty, trod pity under- 
foot, oh, danced on grief. 

Bade the crowd sing and fill my desolation, bade them be 
glad and hide my disbelief. 

Strange we so love the world — for presently, out of my 

window looking on the city, 
I blessed the night, and the roofs slumbering all huddled, 

and I felt no shame nor pity 
For all our dusty days of journeying amid the wreck and 

ruins of our dreams. 
Meandering in a bleared forgetfulness, where lethe laps 

the wharf of sleeping streams. 
I only breathed the air, intensified by the ascending breath 

of million lungs. 
And heard the labouring metropolis, quickened by whispers 

of a million tongues; 
And felt a king of splendid loneliness, and felt an atom of 

the peopled spaces, 
And felt again my lordly egoism, one face distinct among 

the blur of faces. 

1913 



16 



TRANQUILLITY stirred by a sudden spasm, 
Knives of rain that cut the silence, 
Storms that rattle the bones of the forest, 
Calm of the marble-terraced night 
Charred with the spattering of rockets. 

Drums will I hear and battles now, 
And the long death howl of wolves by night. 
Watching the moon on the forest tops, 
Walking with delicate frightened steps 
To the slaughter-house of a red sunrise. 

1918 



17 



1 COULD explain 
The complicated lore that drags the soul 
From what shall profit him 
To gild damnation with his choicest gold. 
But you 

Are poring over precious books and do not hear 
Our plaintive, frivolous songs; 
For we in stubborn vanity ascend 
On ladders insecure, 
Toward the tottering balconies 
To serenade our painted paramours; 
Caught by the lure of dangerous pale hands, 
Oblivion's heavy lids on sleepless eyes 
That cheat between unrest and false repose. 
And we are haunted 

By spectral Joy once murdered In a rage, 
Now taking shape of Pleasure, 
Disguised in many clothes and skilful masks. 
I could disclose 

The truth that hangs between our lies 
And jostles sleep to semi-consciousness; 
Truth, that stings like nettles 
Our frail hands dare not pluck 
From out our garden's terraced Indolence. 
We are not happy, 

And you make us dumb with loving hands 
Reproachful on our lips. 
Nor can we sob our sorrows on your breast, 
For we have bartered diamonds for glass, 
Our tears for smiles, 
Eternity for now. 

1917 



18 



I FEEL in me a manifold desire 
From many lands and times and clamouring peoples, 
And I the Queen 
Of crowding vagabonds, 
Ghosts of lost years in seeming fancy dress, 
With pathos of torn laces 
And broken swords; 
Cut-throats and kings and poets 
Who have loved me 
In visions wild, not knowing 
What I was. 
In me no end 

Even where the last content 
Clasps on my head a crown 
Of shining endurance — 
I slip from all my robes 
Into the rags of a tattered romance; 
The stars crowd at the window, 
Their jealous destiny 
Raps at the door — 
They bob and wink and leer, 
And I must leave the lamplight for the road 
To keep strange company. 
Farewell and Hail I 

1917 



19 



SLLENCE— 
Somewhere on earth 
There is a purpose that I miss or have forgotten. 
The trees stand bolt upright 
Like roofless pillars of a broken temple. 
There is a purpose in Heaven, 
But for me 
Nothing. 

1917 



20 



I SHOULD like to say to the world: 
I have launched my soul like a ship upon free waters ; 
Beautiful she stands in the docks with proud masts cutting 

the sky, 
Perfectly poised, her white sails spreading like wings, 
Her figurehead a woman with breasts that daunt the spray, 
Her flag a flutter of coloured exuberance. 
I should like to see her plunging out of the idle harbour 
Where the sulky tide drifts scum, and the sailors wrangle 

and shout. 
In a thunder of churning waves ramping before her like 

dappled stallions, 
Blossoming behind her a field of etiolate lilies. . . . 

But to the mimicking, plotting, miserly, cynical, 

To the rabble and gabble that dance and kill on the quay, 

I can only say that my soul is a sleeping gondola 

Lulled by a jester's mandolin, till night is atinkle with tunes 

And lantern-lights, along the indolent backwaters. 

19 15 



21 



You pass as in a drugged delirium 
Wrought strange upon the mind's distraction; 
You sing a blasphemous Te Deum 
To harlot virgins, and a fraction 
Of your fulginous colour passes, 
Stains my spirit's great conception 
As it dips into your glasses. 
I that am the sole exception 
To your stillborn, false devices, 
I that know you, I that hate you, 
I that drank now spit your vices 
Through my loathing reinstate you; 
Dive once more into the stagnance, 
Kiss your cynic lips and drink you. 
Concentrate your cruel fragrance. 
Steal your flowers before I sink you, 
Lift with hate instead of praises. 
Show you honour of my scorning. 
Garlanded you go to blazes 
With my rhymes for your adorning I 

1913 



22 



O FACES that look so coldly at me, 
Colder than dawn through the windows of festival, 
Colder than dawn with her grey nun's face. 
You blame me, you curse me with your eyes, 
While your lips are filled with flattering syllables, 
With tinkling bells that harass my calm, 
Disturb my silence and shatter my thoughts. 
Your laughter waltzes like musical boxes, 
How can I hear the triumphant symphonies? 
The scarlet rhapsodies and beryl-cold sonatas? . . . 
Ah, strangers, ah, vacant tedious faces, 
Bobbing beneath the feathery hats, 

You have stolen the wings of birds for your garnishing. 
And the stars and the dim pale petals of the sea 
To make your breasts resplendent, to glitter your dress, — 
How I might love you and weep for you. 
Crowning your brows with a wreath of songs 
If you could understand my singing, 
If you could understand my love ! 
But you are waltzing with your marionettes 
And marching to the music of the clock — 
I cannot bear you to watch me 
With those cold eyes through which I see, 
Emptiness only and dust. 

1918 



23 



I SEE myself in many different dresses, 
In many moods, and many different places; 
All gold amid the grey where solemn faces 
Are silence to my mirth — a flame that blesses 
From yellow lamp the darkness which oppresses . 
Or mid the dancers in their trivial laces 
Aloof, as In the ring a lion paces, 
Disdainful of their slander or caresses. 
I see myself the child of many races, 
Poisoners, martyrs, harlots and princesses; 
Within my soul a thousand weary traces 
Of pain and joy and passionate excesses — ■ 
Eternal beauty that our brief love chases 
With snatch of desperate hands and dying tresses. 

1917 



24 



THERE are songs enough of love, of joy, of grief; 
Roads to the sunset, alleys to the moon; 
Poems of the red rose and the golden leaf, 
Fantastic faery and gay ballad tune. 

The long road unto nothing I will sing, 

Sing on one note, monotonous and dry, 
Of sameness, calmness and the years that bring 

No more emotion than the fear to die. 

Grey house, grey house and after that grey house, 
Another house as grey and steep and still: 

An old cat tired of playing with a mouse, 
A sick child tired of chasing down the hill. 

Shuffle and hurry, idle feet, and slow. 

Grim face and merry face, so ugly all ! 
Why do you hurry? Where is there to go? 

Why are you shouting? Who is there to call? 

Lovers still kissing, feverish to drain 

Stale juices from the shrivelled fruit of lust: 

A black umbrella held up in the rain, 

The raindrops making patterns in the dust. 

If this distaste I hold for fools is such, 

Shall I not spit upon myself as well? 
Do I not eat and drink and smile as much? 

Do I not fatten also in this hell? 

Sadness and joy — if they were melted up. 

Things that were great — upon the fires of time 

Drop but as soup in the accustomed cup. 
Settle in stagnance, trickle into grime. 

25 



Faith, freedom, art that fire a man or two 
And set him like a pilgrim on his way 

With Beauty's face before him — what of you, 
Priest, Butcher, Scholar, King, upon that day? 

The dullard-masses that no god can save ! 

If I were God, to rise and strike you down 
And break your churches in an angry wave 

And make a furious bonfire of your town ! 

God in a coloured globe, alone and still, 
Embroidering wonders with a fearless brain, 

On loom of spaces measureless, to fill 

The empty air with passion and with pain. 

Emblazon all the heavens with desire 

And Wisdom delved for in the depths of time- 
Thoughts sculptured mountainous, and fancy's fire 

Caught in the running swiftness of a rhyme. 

Passion high-pedestalled, pangs turned to treasure, 
Perfected and undone and built afresh 

With concentrated agony and Pleasure . . . 
If I were God, and not a weight of flesh I 

1914 



26 



How often, when the thought of suicide 
With ghostly weapon beckons us to die, 
The ghosts of many foods alluring ghde 
On golden dishes, wine in purple tide 
To drown our whim. Things danced before the eye 
Like tasselled grapes to Tantalus : The sly 
Blue of a curling trout, the battened pride 
Of ham in frills, complacent quails that lie 
Resigned to death like heroes — July peas, 
Expectant bottles foaming at the brink — 
White bread, and honey of the golden bees — 
A peach with velvet coat, some prawns in pink, 
A slice of beef carved deftly, Stilton cheese. 
And cup where berries float and bubbles wink. 

1917 



27 



IT is still something to have cheated God 
And bored the Devil with so easy prey, 
And in the midst of summer woods to raise 
A leafless tree whose stark limbs mock at Heaven, 
Flaunting an iron hatred in the midst of hope — 
Yet sometimes in the loneliness of night 
My buried longings blossom on the boughs, 
My wistful longings come out star by star, 
Till the great sky is light with my desire. 
And on the winds my songs are galloping. . . . 
Ah, to what dismal greyness creeps the soul i 

Too weak, too tired, to struggle from the slough ! 
My weapons rust, my pen is in the dust, 
The moulting feathers plucked from out my wings 
Lie dangling in the hats I stole them for. 
My heart is floating in a claret cup. 
My brain is toppling drunken at the brim. 
My life is drowned within the lurid dregs. 
I turn and fold my hands in a last appeal, 
What heaven shall I pray to and for what. 
Now that my songs to penny tunes are set, 
And nothing is to save of me but flesh? 

1913 



28 



WHAT words that move on wings in a long drift 
Can waft this silence into weary ears, 
And steal into the veins and fingertips 
Of restless bodies, like magnificent ships 
Proud from the seas that calmly sail through fears, 
Mean streets, and miseries, with passage swift. 
What words pricked from the stars and shimmering to^ 

gether, 
Or swept like little winds through leaves alert. 
Can filter through the chinks of bolted doors 
Deaf to the clamours knocking without pause, 
Steeled with indifference against all hurt, 
Deaf to the cry of man, and rack of weather: 
To sing the hubbub of this glittering night. 
Where all the lamps each with a separate soul 
Throb to the ecstasies of dancing life; 
And Beauty, gleaming high her magic knife 
Cuts free the tethered heart from long control 
And flings it like a ball with mad delight 
Into the silver lap of the young moon. 
What needles quick, what threads, what fingers fine 
Can broider tapestries as rich as these, 
Stranger than dreams and drifting melodies, 
Transparent as the gods we half divine, 
Frail as the thoughts that dwindle in a swoon 
Ghostly before begetting. Tinged with pain 
That glimmers pale on hands we cannot find, 
And visioned faces that our dreams create 
Born in the land forbidden us of fate 
And longed for all our lives . . . What words can bind 
Forever Joy, that never comes again 1 

1915 



29 



T THINK myself 

-■- The fool of tragedy strutting upon the stage 

Where murder creeps and whispers. 

The jester clad In piebald tights 

Half black, half golden, with no company 

Save bells that jingle, 

And an effigy. 

The grinning image painted like myself 

Upon a stick. ... 

I think myself 

The fool of comedy mournfully straying 

Amid the revellers. 

Loving the moon and my own shadow 

With its strange solemn gestures — 

Loving the painted moon 

That lets me play with shadows. 

I am the jester on an empty stage 

Playing a pantomime 

To spectres In the stalls, 

Listening at last 

For ghostly mirth and phantom hands applauding, 

And for some king with decadent tired fingers 

To fling a white gardenia at my feet. 

19 1 8 



30 



THE adored, wild, strange, irresistible, 
How they fail one at the last! 
What is there in your faces 
That we should worship with our souls? 
Most lovable, perfidious, 
Vague — 

Molesting even our visions 
With treacherous pathos. 
O vulgarity, mediocrity, stupidity, 
What is It in you that makes us lavish our love. 
Covering your meagre bodies 

With our passionate mantle, dyed with blood and dreams? 
Life and its grey days, and time 
Are a thin curtain through which you shadow. 
Or a dim glass through which you peer. 
You climb in at the windows of our souls 
With ladders and stratagems. 
You mope in corners with reproachful eyes. 
But what do you do for us 
Lute players, dancers, deceivers, 
Other than lie with red lips 
And cajole with tears of beryl? 
People — 

Men and women with laughable, tragic faces 
Winking at love. 
Treading our songs and Illusions 
Under petulant feet 1 

1917 



31 



A ROSE 

WHAT do you ask of me with your beauty, what are you 
urging 
Of labour and painful aspiring to flatter your perfection? 
What secretness of love with terrible blushes surging 
Unseen, have found In you at last their passionate reflection? 

What dreams that lovers knew, as sleep with subtle magic 
Tore off the rags of life and made her dance with body 

spangled. 
Drew back the vacant hours, the tedious and the tragic, 
And showed the glittering souls from bodies we had 

mangled ; — 

What visions made you, emblem of longing and love that 

has died unrequited. 
And all lost joys, and tears, and beauty passionately given. 
Winked at by folly, skewered by the butcher, danced on and 

slighted. 
That now spring up from death, showing their slayers the 

colours. of Heaven? 

You have burst from the ground with your joy, you are 

pining and bleeding. 
Your scent is heavy with sorrowful love; oh, memories 

clinging. 
What do you ask of my soul with such fierceness of pleading, 
I that was glad to forget . . . What do you need of my 



smgmg 



? 



1916 



32 



LIKE flocks of tired birds when autumn comes, 
My spirit flags across the darkening fields 

And melts into the drabness of the sky 

And falls like dust upon the huddled corn. 

But many wizened faces brown and sad 

Peer from the bushes as I wander past, — 

They tell me all those things that old men say 

As youth looks up through tears with pallid cheek. 

"When you are grey and crooked as ourselves. 

When you have bowed before all other gods. 

And found them false, then shall you come at last 

To that dark King of grief, and he shall bless 

Your bread with tears, and manacle your hands, 

And call you slave and lover." ... 

Shall not a child take Pain for company 

And share her loneliness with him? 

Does not a youth know tears 

In the first bitterness of broken love? 

Is Grief so proud a king that none shall come 

To seek him save the blind, the halt, the lame? . . . 

He is a tramp, a beggar, and a clown. 

He sits a jester at the feet of kings 

And scurries with the leaves in Autumn's train. 

He rides the wooden horses at a fair. 

And dances with the jiggers on the stage. 

Led by the violins of discontent 

That whine their music to my listening soul, 

I dance with him the dance of withered leaves, 

We dance together to the tunes of rain 

Played on one note upon the only string. 

1913 



33 



/^H, just beyond the curve of ideal quest 

V-/ That changes as a sea wave to the wind, 

Beyond the cloud that folds around a star, 

And dawn, that stands ajar to let us in. 

Lies that to which our loves and dreams have gone, 

The paradise of all we might have been, 

While we are washed back downwards in the dark 

Where tides recede, to dwindle with the foam. 

1917 



34 



AH ! you, from the small high-walled acre of your lives, 
Your windows only looking upon gardens. 
Only perceiving love and death and truth 
As facts that come to pass, 
That pass and leave you still 
Within your safe small prisons. 
Older, duller, 

To walk and talk among the evergreens. 
You have never known 
Delight of dying slowly, 
Poisoned with raptures 

In many hues from the slim-cut decanters of death — 
The tunes 

That dishevel and smooth. 
Cajole and melancholize — 
The dance 

Which is a whirling of leaves 
In their last scorn of sorrow 
Flung upwards by the wind 
Into the haggard face of winter — 
Nor felt your souls go blowing like balloons 
Tossed by impulsive hands; 
Nor slid as skaters swiftly 
Over the crackling crystals of perilous ice. 
Buffeted with bouquets and blinded with confetti . . . 
You have not felt the abandon 
Of light love 
Dragged by the hair across a slippery floor. . . . 

1916 



35 



MOUTH of the dust I kiss, corruption absolute, 
Worm, that shall come at last to be my paramour, 
Envenomed, unseen wanderer who alone is mute, 
Yet greater than gods or heroes that have gone before. 

For you I sheave the harvest of my hair, 
For you the whiteness of my flesh, my passion's valour, 
For you I throw upon the grey screen of the air 
My prism-like conceptions, my gigantic colour. 

For you the delicate hands that fashion to make great 
Clay, and white paper, plant a tongue in silence, 
For you the battle-frenzy, and the might of hate. 
Science for giving wounds, and healing science. 

For you the heart's wild love, beauty, long care. 
Virginity, passionate womanhood, perfected wholeness, 
For you the unborn child that I prepare. 
You, flabby, boneless, brainless, senseless, soulless I 

1913 



36 



THE curtains are drawn as though it still were night, 
A slip of dawn between them is a dangling silver 

ribbon ; 
And all about the room is quietness — Each patient chair 
Erect, alert, in place. A letter on the table and a book 
Lie as you left them, now bereft of purpose — 
Garish a little in the room's sedateness, you 
Returning dressed so frivolously in all your coloured 

clothes! 
How grey and sober, full of placid wit 
The furniture, the pictures on the wall; 
How steely swift the light, stabbing you to the heart 
As you stand at the window, bright as rushing blood. 
Garish your hair, your shoes, your startling chalky face 
And white, white gloves . . . 
What time is it? . . . Still ticks the tireless clock. 
With face grimacing . . . nearly six it is. . . . ^ 

Yet hurries not nor lingers, like our hearts, 
For In its dial eternity is housed — 
A cock should crow . . . there are no cocks in town I 
But a water cart with surly noise below 
Grates unconcerned along the disconsolate street. 
How cold and how familiar all these things. 
To you so lonely In the enormous dawn 
Slowly unfastening that vermilion dress . . . 

1916 



37 



BLACK VELVET 

THE darkness of the trees at deep midnight 
And sombreness of shadows In the lake; 
A mountain in the starlight wide awake 
Dreaming to Heaven with imperial might 
Of lifted shoulders, huge against the bright 
Bespattered jewelry of stars — the ache 
Of silence, and the sobbing tides that break 
From music. Slumbering cities — candle light 
Snuffed in the flooding darkness, and the train 
Of Queens that go to scaffold for a sin — 
Or splash of blackness manifest of pain, 
Hamlet among his court, a Harlequin 
Of tragedies . . . Mysterious . . . And again 
Venetian masks against a milky skin. 

1917 



38 



NERVES 

THESE curious looms where we have spun our fancies, 
These Intricate webs where our desires are threaded, 
These weird trapezes that our passion frenzies 
Strange acrobats to catch them dizzy headed. 
These tightening strings upon our spirit's fiddles 
Tuneful or out of tune where music hungers 
From writhing bow, these Intertwining riddles 
Mazes and labyrinths and storms and languors. 
These colours twinging on a prism's edges, 
These speckled patterns of fanatic madness 
From glittering eyeballs, these unresting dredges 
For pearls within the depths of sadness and of gladness — 
O tortuous thoughts, what are you seeking after 
As flies around a carcass with a humming dreary. 
Gibing the silent dead with treacherous laughter. 
Molesting quietness and waking up the weary! 
What then, what then, can sleep not crush you to forget- 
ting 
With all her body's beauty, cannot peace submerge you 
O wrangling, juggling, jangling, pirouetting — 
What hope can drag you from the small desires that urge 

you? 
You have lassoed the moon and trapped the sun's bright 

lion, 
And trodden out the red stars into ashes. 
Destroyed night's temple and broken the pillars of iron. 
And striped the snowy horses of the clouds with zebra 

gashes . . . 
You have debauched the world! And as I sit here weary, 
Deafened with your demands and torn in tatters. 
The world seems suddenly most passionless and dreary, 
A poor bewildered clown — and nothing matters. 

1916 
39 



MY pain has all the patience of a nun 
Who kneels and prays for Heaven on the stone, 
In some chill cellar where the amens moan, 
Ave Maria, the long penance spun 
Forever. And the tapers one by one 
Stand like cold angels round the Virgin's throne. 
My soul is tired from kneeling all alone. 
Its little candles yearning to the sun. 

Long have I dreamed of Paradise and seen 

Bright mirages of glory on the grey 

Of sad horizons; I have kept the green 

Surprise of spring through winter and dismay. 

Tasting within the bitter dregs of spleen 

Drugs that bring peace, and wine that maketh gay. 

1917 



40 



THE scandal-monger after all is right — 
The old and cunning voice with weary repetition 
Is justified in all dull words and warnings. 
I see at last how you, 
Spendthrift of passion 
In love's bankruptcy, 

Borrow new beauty from each passing face — 
How being too lavish you did steal 
From generous hands — 

You are the idol builder and the robber of temples, 
Praising with passionate psalms 
The thing you cannot worship — 
And yet your prayers have stirred 
Belief in us — 

We see beyond the false and weary face 
Into your haggard soul and trust from pity — 
We hear beyond the idle music of your voice, 
A wisdom taught by cruelty 
And a tired scorn of treachery and guile — 
We see your wounds and weep, 
You meet our pity with a traitor's kiss — 
For, you are schooled in suffering and schooled 
In teaching pain to others — 
And all that mob of furious accusation 
To which you turn the cheek, or curse so well, 
Are but the ghosts of bodies you have murdered, 
That drive you on in vengeance to fresh crime. 

1917 



41 



WOODS of brown gloom sombring with the hush of 
death, 
Wind's lassitude that sets the tired leaves shivering, 
Starved yellow leaves sighing beneath the feet, a breath 
Consumptive, old, and fever-red leaves quivering, 
As with an earthward flutter lilce a ghostly butterfly 
Listless they perish, wavering and hovering. 
Skeleton branches where the rooks flap wings and cry. 
Perched upon ribs and fingers; and the white mists covering 
The far-off hills and bloodless visage of the sun. 
No noise save the meandering dribble of a rivulet. 
No noise save of the slow hours dropping one by one 
As embers, no colour save Time's ashen coverlet. . . . 
How melancholy here the gayest tunes would sound 
From shrill carousers riotous and merry all. 
As echoes of lost joy their dancing feet upon the ground, 
As funeral bagpipes at a burial. 
And I who wander passionless and forlorn, 
A leaf-forsaken tree symbolic of dejection. 
In rags of old desires, dispirited and torn. 
See in the stagnant glass of Time my soul's reflection. 

1916 



42 



1FEEL so much alone, 
And yet I know that many hopes are storming 
My shut heart; 

For I am boked fast in my own house. 
I pace distracted through its corridors 
To the music of Love's knocking hands 
Against the gate, 
Or silence when they sleep. 
I cannot find the key to let them in, 
I, my own host and guest and ghost, 
Imprisoned in myself I 

1917 



43 



THE COMPLEX LIFE 

I KNOW it to be true that those who live 
As do the grasses and the lilies of the field 
Receiving joy from Heaven, sweetly yield 
Their joy to Earth, and taking Beauty, give. 

But we are gathered for the looms of Fate 
That Time with ever-turning multiplying wheels 
Spins into complex patterns and conceals 
His huge invention with forms Intricate. 

Each generation blindly fills the plan, 

A sorry muddle or an inspiration of God 

With many processes from out the sod, 

The Earth and Heaven are mingled and made man. 

We must be tired and sleepless, gaily sad. 
Frothing like waves In clamorous confusion, 
A chemistry of subtle interfusion, 
Experiments of genius that the ignorant call mad. 

We spell the crimes of our unruly days, 
We see a fabled Arcady In our mind. 
We crave perfection that we may not find. 
Time laughs within the clock and Destiny plays. 

You peasants and you hermits, simple livers I 
So picturesquely pure, all unconcerned 
While we give up our bodies to be burned. 
And dredge for treasure in the muddy rivers. 

We drink and die and sell ourselves for power, 
We hunt with treacherous steps and stealthy knife, 
We make a gaudy havoc of our life 
And live a thousand ages in an hour. 

44 



Our loves are spoilt by introspective guile, 
We vivisect our souls with elaborate tools, 
We dance in couples to the tune of fools, 
And dream of harassed continents the while. 

Subconscious visions hold us and we fashion 
Dehrious verses, tortured statues, spasms of paint, 
Make cryptic perorations of complaint, 
Inverted religion, and perverted passion. 

But since we are children of this age, 
In curious ways discovering salvation, 
I will not quit my muddled generation, 
But ever plead for Beauty in this rage. 

Although I know that Nature's bounty yields 
Unto simplicity a beautiful content. 
Only when battle breaks me and my strength is spent 
Will I give back my body to the fields. 

1917 



45 



SHALL we be christened poets, children of God, 
For blowing sighs into the listeners' ears, 
For tugging at the moaning bells of death, 
And coming as the autumn grave-digger 
To close the eyes of flowers, and shut the fingers 
Of wind upon the rushes, 
Of music upon silence? 
Shall we be given wreathes of bay and laurel 
For forcing tragedy into a rhyme 
As a gaunt beggar in a spangled vest? 
The poet ever wanders after Death, 
The flunkey on a funeral chariot 
Pouring the wine at feasts of burial; 
And all the roses that he plucks from summer 
Are carried to the crypts to deck a corpse. . , . 
How shall the world learn how to laugh again 
When all its songs have only learnt to weep? 

1919 



46 



WHEN I am weary at the antic chance, 
The hobby-horses and the wooden lance, 
The hope and fear in jugglery, and see 
How starved the juggler, mean and miserly. 
And life a laboured trick — the years advance 
A shrilling^chorus in affected dance 
With lust of many eyes that watch and wink 
Fixed on them; or a clown in feverish pink 
Will draw gross laughter by a hideous prance — > 
Vulgarity and sin and souls askance. 
Where fiddles squeal and all the follies spin — 
Till, when the stage is empty, Harlequin 
Through curtained silence trips as from a trance 
With blushing flowers for Columbine — Romance. 

1917 



47 



MOODS 



I CROUCHED upon cushions and wallowed in their 
somnolent caresses, 
And — listening with dread for the moment of my own 

silence 
Rending the flimsy lace of whisperings — 
My gnome dances before me 
Behind a fan of smoke, 
My dwarf squats on my shoulders 
Tweeking their moulted wings, 
My ape peers in the mirror of my face 
Mimicking my soul's gaunt gestures — 
My wolf bays through my moonly loneliness 
Blotching the night with howls — 
My laughter goes whining away on the wind. 
Laughs that are whipped by a soul too sick with merriment, 
Too satiate with humour's emptiness! . . . 

II 

Ah! loveliness with little pointed feet 
Dancing across the leer of ugliness, 
Skimming like a gold thread 
Through a necklace of vile masks — 
Lifting with lotus fingers 
The blue arras of nightmare — 
Loveliness like a delicate silver flute 
Pressed to a negro's lips— 

III 

Do you then wish for all those griefs 
Whose snarling hands you kiss. 
Kneeling in adoraftion to a dagger 
48 



As saints before a cross? 

You who have tossed all flowers away, 

Coveting the drenched red peonies of blood 

Their javelin-petals wet with slaughter, — 

Do you then crave your own blood's offering. 

Your own breast's pallor pierced with knives of flame? 

In your ears are the pattering of the hunter's feet. 

Softer than death, and omens mouthed by winds of twilight. 

You lean across the precipice of time 

Calling and crying 

For the last abyssmal passion of self-slaughter — 

IV 

Waiting, 

Like grey cloud-giants climbing the hills of Heaven 

Carrying vast burdens over the crags of chaos — 

Waiting, 

Like trees that hear the far-off moan of winds. 

Like listening trees that hug their branches round them, 

Their leaves whispering livldly the rumour of storms, 

Waiting like a vast arch of quietness 

Through which a screaming messenger shall dart — 

Like a dense hood of silence 

Pierced by a sword of music — 

Waiting, like the deathly stillness of a pool 

Reflecting the diver poised before he plunges. . . . 

1919 



49 



SMOKE 




Now is the evening dipped knee-deep in blood 
And the dun hills stand fearful in their places. 
Cunning in sin, we shuffle down the streets 
With burdens of vainglory on our backs, 
Spinning with spider-hands the miser's web 
Or sitting placid, gay and fat with ease. 
But out beyond, the armies of the world 
March doomwards to the rhythm of the drum 
Under the thirsting sun. Death holds his state: 

His skeleton hands are filled with scarlet spoil: 
He stands on flaming ramparts, waving high 
The ensign of decay. All his bones are dressed 
With livid roses; all his pillars black 
Are girt in ashen poppies, and on dust 
He raises up his awful golden throne. 

Oh! your fierce shrieks have fainted on deaf ears; 
Your tears have flowed on feet of carven stone; 
Your blood is spilt for the boiling-pot of God 
Where good and evil mix; and all your rage 
Is but a thin smoke wafted in His face. 

1914 



53 



BLOW upon blow they bruise the daylight wan, 
Scar upon scar they rend the quiet shore; 
They ride on furious, leaving every man 
Crushed like a maggot by the hoofs of war: 
Gods that grow tired of paradisial water 
And fill their cups with steaming wine of slaughter. 

I fear a thing more terrible than death : 

The glamour of the battle grips us yet — 

As crowds before a fire that hold their breath 

Watching the burning houses, and forget 

All they will lose, but marvel to behold 

Its dazzling strength, the glamour of its gold. 

I fear the time when slow the flame expires, 
When this kaleidoscope of roaring color 
Fades, and rage faints; and of the funeral-fires 
That shone with battle, nothing left of valour 
Save chill ignoble ashes for despair 
To strew with widowed hands upon her hair. 

Livid and damp unfolds the winding-sheet, 
Hiding the mangled body of the Earth: 
The slow grey aftermath, the limping feet 
Of days that shall not know the sound of mirth, 
But pass in dry-eyed patience, with no trust 
Save to end living and be heaped with dust. 

That stillness that must follow where Death trod, 
The sullen street, the empty drinking-hall, 
The tuneless voices cringing praise to God, 
Deaf gods, that did not heed the anguished call. 
Now to be soothed with humbleness and praise, 
With fawning kisses for the hand that slays. 
54 



Across the world from out the fevered ground 
Decay from every pore exhales its breath; 
A cloak of penance winding close around 
The bright desire of spring. And unto Death, 
As to a conquering king, we yield the keys 
Of Beauty's gates upon our bended knees. 

The maiden loverless shall go her ways, 
And child unfathered feed on crust and husk; 
The sun that was the glory of our days 
Shining as tinsel till the moody dusk 
Into our starving outstretched arms shall lay 
Her silent sleep, the only boon we pray. 

1914 



55 



A RAGGED drummer rides along the street, 
And at his coming 
The silence fills with tunes and rustling feet 
And voices humming. 
He rode a year ago from far away, 
On charger prancing, 

With bright new buttons and with ribbons gay. 
And banners dancing. 
Oh, he was fatter than the bursting drum 
He bore so proudly, 
His roaring music woke the silence dumb 
To thunder loudly. 

And by his side the old men and the young 
Had followed cheering 
Into the sunset smiling as they sung, 
Nor thought of fearing. 
They left their lovers and their mothers' lap, 
Their homes demolish, 
"For, look, I have a ribbon for my cap, 
A sword to polish !" 
And so the town was silent once again, 
Though tunes of battle 
Beat fearful in the wind, or in the rain 
Ghost drums would rattle. 
But at the chuckling dice or careful loom, 
Or candled churches 

A few forgot or prayed or followed doom 
With drunken lurches. . . . 

Now loom and bar and church disgorge the throng. 
In huddled masses 

They stand aghast to hear the drummer's song 
As back he passes — 

Palsied and drear and bent he turns alone 
In rags and tatters, 
And on a soundless barrel with a bone 
He beats and batters. 
56 



"Where march your feet so gaily, careless crowd, 

That we may kiss them? 

Where sound your little songs that rang so loud 

To us that miss them?" 

There are no songs, no happy marching feet, 

No favours flying: 

The drummer passes ... on the quiet street 

The sun is dying. 

Sun that must bleed to death so red and brave! . 

Have done with weeping. 

But put your ribbons on a soldier's grave 

As he lies sleeping. 

1914 



57 



ZEPPELINS MIDNIGHT 

SUDDENLY 
Shutting our lips upon a jest 
As we are sipping thoughts from little glasses, 
A gun bursts thunder and the echoing streets 
Quiver with startled terrors — 
How swift runs fear: quicksilver that Is free I 
Now every muscle weakens, every pulse 
Is set at gallop-pace and every nerve 
Stretched taut with horror and a wild revolt. . . . 
How sweetly spins the world to noise of music, 
How sweet to live life's arrogant adventure! 
Live in a vain world wracked with a thousand pangs, 
Limp in a dull street housed with crumbling dreams, 
To breathe and eat and sleep and love and sigh 
A little longer, oh a little year ! 
Forgotten prayers rise up in resurrection. 
And resolutions of new wondrous lives 
Choke up our hearts and fling us to our knees. . . . 
Worms creep in dreadful hunger from the ground. 
The lurid silent people loved by death, 
And peer into our eyes with sly forebodings 
To drag our body's glory from the light. 
Though all the world should fall into their cells 
And lie within their larders shelf on shelf — 
Yet will I toss the sheets of dust away. 
Yet will I be the mistress of the sun I 



Look how they struggle In a mist of fire. 

Those hunchbacked chimneys and distorted domes- 

Now gloat on Hell, the colour seems to roar. 

An army fierce upon Its own destruction, 

A famished monster tearing in its claws 

Gigantic foods to glut Its lean desire 

58 



I A.M. 



Digesting all the world ! . . . 

Look at the eager people open-mouthed 

That stand as foolish rabbits hypnotised 

By the uncoiling rhythm of a snake, 

Their earth adoring senses caught awhile 

In the red whirlwind of ascending wings ; 

Their spirits straining upward upon strings 

Like kites and air balloons, but more grotesque, 

Lacking the ephemeral beauty of a toy — 

Yet for an hour 

Dyed with the colour that their drabness fears 

They kiss the feet of beauty as she passes 

Starwards, tremendous in a coat of fire. 



The dawn seems drained of blood so colourless — 

Slowly the river moves as though in sleep 

While silent barges 

Slide from the mist like dreams; 

The intricate patterns of the scaffolding 

Are drawn against the sky 

More delicate than lace. 

All the shimmering lights 

Have shrunk away from morning 

As a blue peacock sheaves his starry tail. . . . 

I am alone, most utterly alone, 

More lonely than the last man in the world 

Straying amid the dust of vanished lives. 

More lonely than a spirit stolen from heaven 

Who stands beside that nebulous cold river 

Dividing sleep from death, 

Eternity from time. . . . 

Nothing disturbs the white peace of the dawn, 

She brings no feverous memories of night 

And sheds no tears. 

59 



3 A.M. 



Only two hours ago 

Fire walked in crimson armour through the city 

Piercing the night's black tent with glittering javelins, 

While shrieks and whispered omens flew like bats 

Among the silver foliage of the stars. . . . 

But rage has left no furrow in the sky, 

No wake of sparks across the placid water. . . . 

This is the ominous and sacred hour 

When priest-like the world kneels 

Bowed low toward the empty throne of day — 

Soon will the herald trumpet-blast be heard 

And the flamingo messengers will come 

Flocking from out the burnished cage of sunrise. . . . 

This is the hour of nothing, 

Colourless and chill 

Oblivion's hands are folded on the world, 

As sits an idol holding in his fingers 

A scentless lotus carven out of stone. 



4 A. M. 



Leaving the dun river with hurried tapping feet 

And up the long uncomfortable street 

With eyes uninterested yet forced to see and read 

The dingy notices once sharp and bright with greed. 

Now drear with want, that swear the Queen's Hotel 

And Brown's Hotel and King's are doing well — 

A soldier and a beggar mock me as I go. 

The light steals after me, emerging slow 

And pale from the dim alleys shadow-crouched. 

I hurried by the drunkard as he slouched 

From lamp-post unto lamp-post. . . . Then I saw 

Caught in the mirror of a tailor's door 

My own reflection as I hurried past. 

My flaring colours and my face aghast — 

The scarlet tassel of my hat that hung 

60 



Limp as a spent flame, and my skirt tliat clung 

About my knees and fluttered at the back: 

An injured moth, with sulphur stripes and black, 

My bag flamboyant as a pillar-box; 

My frayed gilt fringe of hair and tarnished locks. 

Jagged and crude and swift I seemed to pass 

Painted too brightly on that temperate glasso 

. . . An omnibus from sudden corner reels : 

Silence lies mangled underneath the wheels^ 

1915 



61 



O FLATTERY, imposture, battle show. 
What banners have you woven from the parted 
raiment, 
What crimes from Calvary, what endless flow 
Of blood from blood, revenge, exacted payment! 

How have you turned the simple truth to lies 
Made capital from creeds and missed their beauty, 
Exalted vainly with self-pitying sighs 
The wrongs enacted in the name of duty. 

And ever quoting God for your excuse, 
Bribing divinity to cloak your shame. 
You train the spirit for material use. 
You sacrifice men's hearts to feed your flame. 

When shall the world be rid of these bald priests, 

Pig-snouted with their gilded wolfish ears. 

The scarlet cardinals of drunken feasts 

Whose hands are washed in blood, whose feet in tears? 

1916 



62 



WHAT will happen to the beggar, and the sinner, and 
the sad, 
And the drunk that drinks for sorrow, and the maimed, and 

mad; 
What will happen to the starving, and the rebel run from 

drilling, 
Cowardly, afraid of fighting, and the child who stole a 

shilling? 
They shall go to prison black 
With a striped shirt on the back, 
Feast on bread and water there 
In a cell, without a care. 
They shall learn at least their duty. 
Never tempted more of beauty — 
They shall walk in rows and praise the Lord, 
And one or two shall hang upon a cord — 
And two or three shall die of grief alone — 
(And this is well, for sinners should atone,) 
And five or six shall curse the God that made them, 
(And this is wicked, for the priests forbade them,) 
And those that grew from dust shall go to dust 
Downtrodden. Saith the preacher: — "God is just." 

1917 



63 



IF I were what I would be, and could break 
The buttressed fortress of stupidity 
Where laws are sentinels, and lies the masonry, 
Surrounded with inertia, weedy lake, 
Where centuries of mud lie curdled, and the fake 
Grandeur of cardboard turrets, solemn puppetry — 
The gods are blinking at us sleepily. 
Tired of our games, the muddles that we make, 
The bloodshed, idol worshipping, the chess 
Of king, queen, castle, bishop, knight and pawn— 
The rigid squares of black and white, they dress 
With their perpetual challenge — faded, worn, 
Are all the creeds and praises you profess 
To weary gods that stretch themselves and yawn. 

1917 



64 



HOLY RUSSIA 

THE ghostly blood of thee is in my veins, 
Back through the centuries of death and birth, 
Sometime I thrilled with thy gigantic pains, 
'My kin lie somewhere covered with thine earth. 

And ever as in dreams I seem to see 
Those streets and people with their colours cold; 
Thou hast the singing hungers of the sea, 
The tides of restless passion ages old. 

I know thy humours and their contradiction, 
I know thy fevers and hallucinations, 
I see beneath the painted mask of fiction 
Thy face of fierce and weary exaltations. 

And art thou come to gaze with wakened eyes 
Into the sick world's travail and her grief, 
Dost thou from thy long battling surmise 
The end of battle and the world's relief? 

While we are creeping in our crooked ways 
Along the crumbling roads of worn-out creeds 
Where Ignorance walks royally through days 
That smell of death, decay and bloody deeds. 

While we still cry to God for strength to kill, 
Reminding Him that Britain rules the waves. 
And grind young bones for the commercial mill, 
And build munition works among the graves. 

Still crying "Honour," "Country" and "The Flag," 
"The last heroic fight in Freedom's name !" 
Though Kings make mouths at Kings, and Prelates brag- 
They boast of murder and they reek of shame ! . . . 

65 



Thou that hast touched the mystic wounds of God, 
And strewn with broken hearts the Virgin's feet, 
Feehng beneath the burden and the rod 
His justice and Her pity in the street. 

Justice and Pity, crying in the wind — 
We only hear the guns that never cease, 
The flapping of our flags has made us bhndl 
We may not see the sacred gods of peace. 

But thou dost build fanatic temples for them. 
And thou dost pave the road with sanity, 
And all the train of bitter ghosts adore them. 
Who died to puff a monarch's vanity. 

I hear thy orchestras of holy cheers, 

The drum that life has snatched away from death. 

And all the sighing rhythm of thy tears, 

And the brave laughter of thy trumpet-breath. 

Peace ! But a cynic whispered In my ear 
How kings like worms still wrangled for a crown 
That lay amid the dust — and I could hear 
A hum of money-changing in the town. 

I feared that afterwards, when all is won. 
We shall forget the meaning of thy deed — 
And man will creep as he has always done 
Along the little gutters of his greed. 

1917 



66 



How deeply nurtured is your foolishness, 
Calling destruction great and slaughter brave, 
Making large triumph of a little grave, 
Imperial purple of a mourning dress, 
The gun an emblem of your godliness — 
A fluttering ribbon or a banner's wave, 
A medal or a bayonet, or rave 
Of singing, marching in the forward press 
Of hatred to the banging of a band; 
Your country's honour and the world's release. 
Are they not strong in courage who withstand 
The armies of your folly and shall cease 
To tarnish with spilt life their motherland? 
Cowards — or martyrs — crucified for peace. 

1917 



67 



OF all who died In silence far away 
Where sympathy was busy with other things, 
Busy with worlds, inventing how to slay, 
Troubled with rights and wrongs and governments and 
kings. 

The little dead who knew so large a love. 

Whose lives were sweet unto themselves a shepherding 

Of hopes, ambitions, wonders in a drove 

Over the hills of time, that now are graves for burying. 

Of all the tenderness that flowed to them, 

A milky way streaming from out their mother's breast, 

Stars were they to her night, and she the stem 

From which they flowered — now barren and left unblessed. 

Of all the sparkling kisses that they gave 
Spangling a secret radiance on adoring hands. 
Now stifled in the darkness of a grave 
With kiss of loneliness and death's embracing bands. 

No more! — And we, the mourners, dare not wear 
The black that folds our hearts in secrecy of pain. 
But must don purple and bright standards bear, 
Vermilion of our honour, a bloody train. 

We dare not weep who must be brave in battle — 
"Another death — another day — another inch of land — 
The dead are cheering and the ghost drums rattle" . . . 
The dead are deaf and dumb and cannot understand. . . . 

Of all who died in darkness far away 

Nothing is left of them but LOVE, who triumphs now. 

His arms held crosswise to the budding day. 

The passion-red roses clustering his brow. 

1917 

68 



AND afterwards, when honour has made good, 
And all you think you fight for shall take place, 
A late rejoicing to a crippled race; 
The bulldog's teeth relax and snap for food, 
The eagles fly to their forsaken brood, 
Within the ravaged nest. When no disgrace 
Shall spread a blush across the haggard face 
Of anxious Pride, already flushed with blood. 

In victory will you have conquered Hate, 
And stuck old Folly with a bayonet 
And battered down the hideous prison gate? 
Or will the fatted gods be gloried yet. 
Glutted with gold and dust and empty state, 
The incense of our anguish and our sweat? 

1917 



69 



PITY the slain that laid away their lives, 
Pity the prisoners mangled with gyves, 
Thin little children and widowed wives, 
And the broken soldier who survives. 

Pity the woman whose body was sold 
For a little bread or a little gold, 
And a little fire to keep out the cold, 
So tired, and fearful of growing old. 

Pity the people in the grey street 
Before the dawn trooping with listless feet 
Down to their work In the dust and the heat, 
For a little bread and a little meat. 

Pity the criminal sentenced to die. 

Loving life so, with the world in his eye. 

In his ears and his heart, with the passionate cry 

Of love that will call when he may not reply. 

Pity them all, the imperative faces 
That peer through the dark where we sleep in our laces, 
Where we skulk among cushions in opulent places. 
With indolent postures and frivolous graces. 

Eyes that prick the darkness, fingers thin 
Tearing at hypocrisy, and Sin 
That batters the door and staggers in. . . . 
The streets surround with clamour and din, 

Drowning our flutes, till the cries of the city 
Flurry us, flutter us, force us to plty,^ 
Force us to sigh and arrange a committee. 
Tea-party charity danced to a ditty. ... 
70 



The scarlet ribbons flutter and wave, 
A rebel flag on a rebel grave, 
But to us the strong alone are brave, 
And only the rich are worthy to save! 

Yet who shall blame us, plaited and curled. 
Where silk banners fly and the red flags are furled, 
Flags that blow where the dead are hurled, 
Tattered and dripping with blood of the world I 

1918 



71 



FLAME 




You have understood so little of me, and my adoration 
That shone upon my forehead, like a crown of curious 
stones, 
You turned into a cap and bells for Folly's coronation 
And made a foolish tinkling from my laughter and my 
moans. 

You have led me through the market like an ass upon the 

halter, 
You have fed me upon thistles; I was driven by the crowd; 
But my faith in what I am, my conceit, you cannot alter; 
I was proud in pomp and purple, as a clown I leave you 

proud! 

A greater pride than sits upon a throne for mere adorning, 

A fiercer strength than in the gods of wood that cannot 
bow; 

I tore my purple into rags and knelt to bear your scorn- 
ing, 

And I am rebel leader to a band of beggars now. 

In the twilight of my love I stand and strew the bitter 

ashes; 
They are blown into my eyes again, the fires that shone for 

you; 
In the blushing of the sunset their ghostly fervour flashes 
As they sink for everlasting in the darkness and the dew. 

Your heart is as a moonstone hieroglyphed with secret 

letters; 
You have never read my passion, as I never learnt their 

sign, 
But I praise your haunting beauty and I bear the bruise of 

fetters 
And I reel from your remembrance as I spill the ancient 

wine. 

75 



All those women I have envied with their pink and foolish 

faces, 
Moths that have out-distanced me in circling round your 

head, 
For the strangeness of your kisses and the curse of your 

embraces 
And the frenzy of pursuing where your despot feet have led. 

I will shout, and tear the darkness; I will snuff the candles 
sacred 

With the rage of my abasement, with the blast of my fare- 
well; 

I will smile with cynic softness, but my tears are dropping 
acrid 

And sizzling in a gutter down the white-hot streets of Hell ! 

1914 



76 



LULLED are the dazzling colours of the day, 
And mild the heavens, burnt out like an ash. 
Hungry and strange along the shadowed dusk 
Walks Melancholy, and with bitter mouth 
Sucks the last juices from the sun's ripe fruit. 
Now can I sing the sickly lines of love 
And of love's failure, spell my sorrows out 
In the sad spaces of the gloaming night. 
And stooping, huddled, hide me in the dark. 
My words were fireless in the flaming sun. 
And all the throats of flowers from their content 
Puffed back my pinings proudly in my face 
And bade me give them tunes to make them dance. 
Lean, hungry, like my love the moon looks down 
From the white solitudes of Heaven. All aghast 
And sterile as the arms of my desire 
She flings her light despairing on the sky. 
The night is strange and still, for dropping tears, 
Or burying hatred in a deep-dug grave. 

1914 



77 



WASHED at my feet by the curded foam of sluggish 
waves, 
As the rain spHnters and the mud gleams with malicious 

Like a frail shell, million tinged and quaintly wrought 

The thought of you, which held against mine ear 

Hums all the echoed melodies of your soul; 

The sigh of wearied life, the ebbing sweet of love, 

The little tunes of wine mixed with the chants of death, 

The following of beauty's fugitive limbs 

Whose classic feet, and rapturous pale breast 

Gleam on the clouds and foam, 

Call to her lovers. — 

Thus standing in the blasting of the wind. 

And numb with ceaseless drip of moments from the cloud 

Of lowering hours, I toy with this strange relic of the sea, 

Turned with such perfectness from her tumultuous wheels, 

Thoughts of you million tinged and quaintly wrought. 

1916 



78 



MY poems cannot laugh. They are the voice 
Of birds that mourn and cry above the sea, 
And this wild joy my love has brought to me 
Lies dumb and knows not how it shall rejoice. 

I am most weary of the petulant songs I sing, 
Most tired of tunes that only learn to weep, 
And long to turn my dreams from their pale sleep 
Into a gentle minstrelsy with harp of silver string; 

To fashion for my love one perfect verse 
Symmetrically threaded by beauty word on word, 
Flowing and flashing like the luted laughter of a bird 
To bless the soul with music which I ravished with a curse. 

But as a coward in the general gloom 
I mimic fortune with my tunes of ill. 
Nor pipe despite her wistful mirth and trill 
Of love that moves with music into Doom; 

Of love that thrills with joy the graveyard cold, 
And like a gay canary in a cage 
Mocks at his prison, and with flippant rage 
Flaunts his bright wing to fill the gloom with gold. 

1916 



79 



ON the hill there is a tavern, long-loved, well-remembered, 
Where all the sleepy afternoon the little tables dream. 

And the cool green bottles ranged, laugh and gleam with 
golden highlights, 

And the waiters wrangle, and the flies, with murmurs 
merged and mixed. 

We will go there, you and I, to wake the nodding content- 
ment. 

And toast our fancies reverently with red wine and with 
white wine. 

And with eyes mesmerised to the horizon gazing. 

Dream our iridescent dreams and sigh our shadowy sighs. 

1916 



80 



OH canst thou not hear in my heart all its whispering fears 
Whose wind-like voices 
Flutter the leaves of my hope and bow them with tears 
While the body rejoices. 

Till all the pomp and beauty of day, the Cardinal Sun 
Trailing his scarlet vesture 
Leaves after light the pale hills sullen and dun, 
Turns with a gesture 

Colour and glory to smoke that is deathly and grey. 
I follow the shadows of sorrow 
That press so close to the dancing heels of the day 
And darken the morrow. 

The world turns pale and cold, for I seem to see 
Beyond its golden visor 

The leering skull that derides at our lives and me 
Being older than life and wiser. ... 
I hear the cry of the world that writhes to the lash of the 

whip 
Beyond the sound of the treetops singing 
To the wind's persuasive violins and bells of dews that drip, 
Or rush of feathers winging. . . . 
Dost thou fear death as I ? Ah no, but thy lips are against 

m> cheek 
Murmuring tenderly 
The perfumed lies stolen from spring that wistfully through 

the bleak 
Windows of frost so slenderly 
Steals her little ghost's flute. Thou tellest of things that 

might be 
If life were as kind as a lover. 

If we were beloved of the world and the world of we. 
Thy white words hover 

Dove-like in rose leaf evenings over the nest 
Silvering heaven 

With rustle of lovers that nestle together for rest. 
If I could have given 
8i 



My tired lips to kisses and my body to sleep and to thee, 
Ah then and then only 

The dust were as gentleness mingling thy beauty with me 
And death were not lonely. 

1916 



82 



As In the silence the clear moonlight drips 
Among the fields that love her drowsily, 
These passionate moments trickle on through time, 
From soul to languorous soul. 
Like mad musicians upon fretted harps. 
The senses play upon the poignant nerves, — 
And colours clothe our mood 
As smoke against the light, as shimmering prisms 
Irised with pallors of an opal's heart 
In which the glittered pattern of desire 
Smoulders and changes. . . . 
O love, thou nightingale-throated singer. 
Thread on thy jewelled chords from start to star 
And keep thy silver delicate delight 
Out of the flush and lustre that makes mad. 
Let thy fairy feet 

Go tripping down a scarcely scented path, 
Between an avenue of breathless flowers. 
The hours glide by as swans across a lake, 
Across the luminous waters of desire. 
And beat as wings the rustle of soft words, 
As love bends down. 
Breathing his adoration on a fainting mouth. 

1917 



83 



I CAN but give thee unsubstantial things 
Wrapt as in rose-leaves between thought and thought, 
No gems or garments marvellously wrought 
On ivory spools with rare embroiderings. 
Nor for thy fingers precious, fabled rings 
That cardinals have worn, and queens have bought 
With blood and beauty. I have only sought 
A song that hovers on illusive wings. 

Accept from me a dream that hath no art, 
I give my empty hands for thee to hold, 
Take thou the gift of silence for my part, 
With all the deeper things I have not told. 
Yet if thou canst, decipher in my heart 
Its passions writ in hieroglyphs of gold, 

1917 



84 



I HAVE no other friend but thee, 
But while I tell thee all my thought 
Thine ears are buzzing with gossip of dreams, 
Soothsayings and sighs, and little things — 
How canst thou listen to me? 

II 

Perchance I roamed under the old moon too long, 

And when my cheek grew pale 

I laid it against thine to feel the blood beat back 

Responsive in the double rose of joy — 

But I feel thee shifting away into loneliness 

Where the ghost moon glides between us. . . . 

Ill 
When at a masquerade 

I meet thee in the shrill indifferent throng, 
Our faces painted each In some disguise 
Of varnished revelry; 
I whisper in thine ear 

Fables, and flatteries, and Inconsequent tales. 
Trivial as the dust that whirls about our feet. 
And shower the multicoloured streamers high 
Where Folly is king of midnight — 
Suddenly dost thou snatch thy mask aside. 
And thy still face looks out. 
Weary and overwise 
Where the mad pretence avails not. 

IV 

Long ago we walked together In a garden; 
It was evening and the leaves fell down; 

85 



Silently we passed over the dead, the fallen, 

Over flowers and branches that were withered there- 

And the air was weary with the scent of other days, 

A fragrance faint and pensive. 

The sighing of the leaves beneath our feet 

Were as old dreams retold, 

Stirred from the golden quilt of memory. 

And farewells rang their whispering bells. 

Tolling the days away. 

But peace lay folded between our hands 

As we thought of the vanishing years 

And of love dying in the arms of love. 



Sometimes I look Into the glass 

And see my face without the conquering light 

That gave me glamour when I gave thee love. 

Fain would I bathe in the fountains of beauty, 

To glitter with the crystals of her sparkling desire, 

And touch with my feet the floors of a bright paven Hell, 

And rear my head among the lilies of Heaven. 

I would be for thee 

As a ring of white flowers on the sward, 

As a red fire playing to thy breath. 

As a flock of kingfishers 

Surprised from the dark fringe of rushes ! 

Remember only this, 

My will toward all loveliness, and look 

Deep in thyself for my reflected soul. 

VI 

Be perfect — for I love thee more In thought 
Than thou canst reach In every trivial day. 
Since days are as the flowers on a wreath 
86 



That wither while we bind them each to each. 

Only the soul is timeless, and no round of days 

Can wall it in a little space of ground. 

Sometimes our minds are cheated by the clock 

And crave love, wisdom, joy within an hour. 

But the patient spirit stands 

Waiting the last fulfilment. 

Around thy soul my thoughts are as garlands 

Or as an endless rosary. 

Be perfect! lest my psalm should falter 

And my hands part from the unriveted faith 

With Amen scarcely sighed. 

1917 



87 



BODIES heaving like waves, 
Sighing through the dishevelled tresses of foam, 
The massive whiteness of limbs flung out of shadow, 
Splashed with ecstasial moonlight, 
Sculptured voluptuously in ephemeral marbles. 
Lingering touch of fingers, 
Cooler than the curving ringlets of spray- 
Fluting the new-blown petals of a shell. 
And kisses murmuring as the lips of darkness 
Against the ivory forehead of the moon. 

1919 



88 



YOUR face to me is like a beautiful city 
Dreaming forever by the rough wild sea, 
And 1 the ship upon a wilderness of waves 
Heavily laden with memories. . . . 
I roam over all the earth 
Making rhymes of you, and singing songs, 
Because your face will never let me rest, 
Because I can not frame it in a star 
Surrounded with my cloudy reveries, 
Because I may not pluck it like a flower 
To breathe the incense of its perfumed soul — 
Your face is like the carved hilt of a sword 
Whose sheath is in my breast 1 

1918 



89 



OH ! why will you not let me love you 
Well enough? 
You have plucked my blossoms, 
Gathered the leaves 
And revived them with water; 
But all the tortuous roots 
Delving for your spirit 
In subterranean passions 
With a blind unresting desire, 
Have you felt them, have you known? 
In the blackest night of sleep 
Though I be sunk a thousand fathoms 
In the cerulean depths of slow oblivion, 
My soul still swims toward you 
Against the envious pressure of the tide. . . . 
You who are so tired, so filled with sleep 
That you would brush a rose-leaf from your check 
Lest its heaviness should stir your rest, 
How can you shoulder the weight of my great burden 
That is too vast for me to bear alone? 
I tell you 

Love is no little thing, 
No moth-winged Cupid painted on the air, 
No thin flute music petaling the silence 
As leaves that flutter from a cherry tree. 
It is the thought that broods upon its death, 
The dread of mountains looking to the storm 
Ere shrieks of lightning cleave their breasts in twain. 
It is the fire that pillars up the stars 
To mix its flame with their eternal gold. 
Oh, listen to me ! 

You shall hear my message sung from sphere to sphere 
As star-dust pouring a path through Heaven. 
You shall know me 
In the pensive shadows of trees, 
In the luminary phantoms 
90 



Reflected in the stillness of a lake; 

In the arrows of sunlight shot through meshing leaves 

And quivering in the moss; 

In the abandoned play of breakers 

Showering their crystals to the moon; 

In the folly of rainbow dolphins. 

I only ask of you 

To be the diver in my deepest pool, 

To bring from out its blue obscurity 

The things my life has moulded unaware, 

Treasures my passion and my hunger fashioned 

In loneliness of prayer unlit by life, 

Created out of nothing save myself 

Within the blind fast silence of the soul. 

191S 



91 



MY devotion kneels to you, 
Holding a candle to illumine your face. 
My loneliness is your shadow 
Along the solitary roads. 
My passion is a book between your hands 
Whose leaves are as the leaves of violets, 
A volume of pressed flowers 
Scenting your fingers though you read it not. 
And my white faith 
Is a silken surplice clothing you in peace. 

1919 



92 



ISLANDS 

AS launched upon the loneliness of time 
We float and dream of what the waves conceal, 
Each like a thought that rolls with rapid zeal 
Succeeded by a breaker of fierce crime, 
Or curling passion, or a rhythm of rhyme, 
Or Indolent ripple sighing at the keel — 
Beyond us, though our fretted longings reel. 
The lulled horizon sleeps, the still hours climb — 
So toss our weary ships, till from afar 
Our visioned island rises suddenly. 
Where palaces like cloudy colours are. 
With scented gardens terraced to the sea, 
The silver steps to our appointed star 
Where gleam the spires that pierce eternity. 

1917 



93 



MANY things I'd find to charm you, 
Books and scarves and silken socks, 
All the seven rainbow colours 
Black and white with 'broidered clocks. 
Then a stick of polished whalebone 
And a coat of tawny fur, 
And a row of gleaming bottles 
Filled with rose-water and myrrh. 
Rarest brandy of the 'fifties, 
Old liqueurs in leather kegs. 
Golden Sauterne, copper sherry 
And a nest of plover's eggs. 
Toys of tortoise-shell and jasper, 
Little boxes cut in jade; 
Handkerchiefs of finest cambric, 
Damask cloths and dim brocade. 
Six musicians of the Magyar, 
Madness making harmony; 
And a bed austere and narrow 
With a quilt from Barbary. 
You shall have a bath of amber, 
A Venetian looking-glass. 
And a crimson-chested parrot 
On a lawn of terraced grass. 
Then a small Tanagra statue 
Found anew in ruins old, 
Or an azure plate from Persia, 
Or my hair in plaits of gold; 
Or my scalp that like an Indian 
You shall carry for a purse, 
Or my spilt blood in a goblet . . . 
Or a volume of my verse. 

1916 



94 



LAMPLIGHT AND STARLIGHT 




LAMP-POSTS 

THE eternal flame of laughter and desire 
Breaks the long darkness with a little glance, 
Tin all the gloom Is radiant In a dance 
Of yellow hopefulness, reflecting fire 
That dreams from Heaven's lamps as we aspire 
Sadly toward their jubilance — Romance 
Of faery glitter In the streets of chance — 
Those beacon-trees that blossom from the mire 
Within the fog of our despairing gloom; 
In the glum alleys, down the haunted night 
Through tunnelling of subterranean doom. 
Among the grovelling shadows, kingly bright, 
They bear their coronets of golden bloom 
To front our anguish with their brave delight. 

1917 



97 



LONDON 

RICHER than fields of corn that fire In summer, 
Strange as the moon on forest rising sudden, 
More fearful and beloved than peace or silence. 
Heart with my heart at pace in throbbing fever. 
Calling towards me with a voice incessant. 
Thou that begot me : From whose streets triumphant 
I, coloured fiercely with thy passion, wakened! 
I sucked red wine, not milk, from thy gaunt bosom. 
My senses in thy fearfulness found beauty, 
And honey in thine oaths and lamentations. 
I played about thy feet that know not resting 
And bathed me in the sweat of thine endeavour. 

When on thy gala-nights the thronged lamps glitter. 

Sparkle like sequins, and the plumes of shadow 

With curling smoke, with rain and rippling gutter 

Are tossed in feathered gaiety about thee — 

Thick grow the crowded streets in coloured pageant. 

Kaleidoscope of people, circling, crossing, 

Till the brain frenzies to a thousand patterns. 

While the ears buzz with noises of their laughter; 

Shouts hoarse and coarse and shrill in one great roaring. 

As of the angry ocean in her travail ... 

They haunt me in the tranquil of the forest. 

Those faces pain has marked and toil has mangled; 

Pangs greater than the lonely Crucifixion 

Here crucified each day with lust and hunger. 

Hung up unlovely in the open market; 

Made gay with paper garlands, covered over 

With tinsel loincloth, painted like a puppet. 

Lest the elect in passing should be startled. 

Lest they should smear the blameless brow of honour 1 

With bloody shoes and spinning-wheels of traffic 

Vermilion-splashed, the city rushes onward, 

And thorns of death and lust and fruitless labour 

98 



Lie underneath the feet forever dancing. 

Gay tunes are rasped upon a weary fiddle, 

Or voice of moaning in the tinkling cymbal, 

Offspring of humour from disaster's bowels. 

I love the bitter and the rude, the drunken, 

The tramps and thieves that skulk among the shadows; 

The faces red as fire and dead as ashes, 

A million faces scattered like confetti. 

All changing, whirling, trodden into nothing. 

There Beauty wanders strange, an-hungered, weary. 

Throned on a dust-heap, or triumphant reeling 

In mad disorder from the couch of chaos. 

ragged Beauty, through the mournful houses, 
How frail the feet that lead the dawn towards us, 
Blushed in the sunrise with a great ambition, 
Spent in the evening like a rose of fever, 
Fainting before us paler than a lily. 

While here each day self-satisfied and placid 
Moves opulent among the groves of summer; 
The larks delight, the laughter of the thrushes. 
The kindly peasants in their ruddy orchard. 
Please for a while until the spirit sickens 
And turns her panting to her ancient lover. 

Oh, well I know the quickening of the pulses, 

Joy bursting through disgust as field and pasture 

Grow fewer, paler, till the eager houses 

Like hungry animals eat up the spaces 

And close upon the miles that God created. 

With triumph of man's greed. As warriors listening 

To the far rhythm in the drums of battle. 

As seamen hear the mighty tide-wave bursting, 

1 feel the scamper of your feet approaching 

And your great starving arms and strangling fingers 
That drag me back to my perverted Heaven 1 
1914 
99 



SLOWLY the pale feet of morning 
Tread out the ashes of midnight still burning with fever- 
ous lamplight, 
Colourless, cold, as the rainclad 
Sleep-drugged river that carries the wreckage of cities out 
sea-ward. 
Slowly the fingers of dawn-light 
Snuff out the candles that yearned to those Gods of dehrium, 

Sleep-huge as shadows grimacing 
From niches made black with the smoke of a fire-spangled 
passion. 
Smoothly the wild hair of darkness 
Is plaited for rest, and the faces of visions are covered with 
sleep veils. 
Patiently, Morning, the priestess 
Drones out a psalm for the souls that we damned in the 
blackness, 
Gashed with the daggers of street-lights, 
Crushing the poisonous berries of sinister kisses, — 

Morning with healing and kindness 
Folds up the dresses dishevelled with terror and laughter, 

Sweeps up the rags of our shadows 
That danced in a red smoke of dreams on the walls of 
oblivion. 

1919 



100 



WHAT have I to do with them, 
The red athletes in their snow-white clothes? 
They are sun lovers and moon haters, 
Toiling or playing in the fields 
Whereon no shadows lie, 
Pensively, whispering together — 
They are space lovers and haters of the stars, 
Soundly they sleep by night nor ever see 
The tiaraed brows of darkness. 
I weary of their striving upward and onward. 
Away from the green hush of twilight, 
Where silence drips from the trees. 
Away from the solemn avenues 
Where the ghosts blow by 
Along with a drift of leaves. 

Let us linger awhile 

Far away from the frets and wars of the world. 

From the strong men 

With their strident hymning voices and marching feet — 

Let us walk alone 

For the love of our own shadows 

Stretching their length on lawns of powdered silver. 

With behind us the sky's grey curtain 

Drawn backward from the moon. ... 

Let us sit by the fireside 

And hear the wind's shrill orchestras. 

Fiddle and fife and flute, 

And omened bagpipe screaming. . . . 

Let us lie abed and dream 

Through the long summer's morning 

Of trivial things, and beautiful. . . . 

Let us dance with Folly when midnight knocks on his 

golden gong; 
Let us run through pools of wine 
And be splashed with purple. 

lOI 



Let us, being sick, make merry. 
And rejoice when we are weary. 
Let us sit by our grave as at a banquet, 
Drinking to Death. 

What have we to do with them, 
Sons of the sun and the soil, 
Daughters of the hearth and the field? 
They that remake the world 
Melting our idols for silver. 
Our goblets for gold; 
Tearing our temples down 
To build their red brick villages. 

The doomed world faints into mist, 

World of our indolence and dreams, 

And the faces and bodies we love 

Sink through oblivion, and are seen 

Dimly, as divers through the waters. 

Old worlds and new worlds ! 

Let us slip between them. 

And float on the stream that floweth nowhither — 

Our red ambitions burn 

To a blue smoke of forgetting; 

Our moonshine faints on the tide that goeth out, 

As the sun leers to the tide that cometh in. 

1918 



102 



AMONG the crumbling arches of decay 
Where all around the red new buildings crept, 
Where huge machines had rolled the past away, 
And the dead princes lay accursed and slept; 

Among the ruins I beheld a man 

Who heeded not the engines as they neared. 

Painting dead carnivals upon a fan, 

He smiled and trifled with his pointed beard. 

And here and there were flung a mess of things, 
Tokens and fripperies and faded dresses, 
Kept from the courtships of a thousand kings. 
Tossed roses for the tossing of caresses. 

A carven sabre hung upon the wall, 
A toy thing, with no rust of blood upon it, 
A tray of glasses, an embroidered shawl, 
A muff, a bottle and a feathered bonnet. 

And mirrors flashed their argent memories 

Out of the shadows where they laughed and gleamed, 

While ghostly faces of past vanities 

Come back to dream there where they once had dreamed. 

The stranger turned his head and bowed to me 
And waved me vaguely to a gilded chair. 
I spoke : "You are a connoisseur, I see, 
You really have a fine collection there." 

He bowed to me again, and in his hand 
Dangled a string of gems, they caught my eye 
With beckoning lights — I could not understand — 
His fingers seemed to touch them like a sigh 
103 



So much he loved their frail inconsequence. 
I spoke of progress conquering decay, 
And tired the stillness with my common sense 
Loud-spoken in the jargon of the day. 

But I have never met so queer a man, 
"I better love my memories," he said, 
"Look at those painted figures on the fan, 
How delicate and wistful are the dead." 

1917 



104 



As a nun's face from her black draperies 
So full of mystery the moon looks down. 
She dreams of a passion that shall outlive time, 
Of Beauty's face beheld unveiled and close, 
Of God Who blows the worlds like bubbles up, 
Smiling away, to watch them swell and die. 
She dreams of music played among the stars 
When the slow tongues of silence are unloosed. 
Above the city glittering giddily. 
Above the jostling heads of man she moves, 
Strange as a dreamer walking in her sleep. 

1912 



lOS 



THE sun is lord of life and colour, 
Blood of the rose and hyacinth, 
Hair of the sea and forests. 
Crown of the cornfields, 
Body of the hills. 
The moon is the harlot of Death, 
Slaughterer of the Sun, 
Priestess and poisoner she goes 
With all her silver flock of wandering souls, 
Her chant of wailing waters, 

The bed of shimmering dust from which she comes 
Bound all around with bandages of mist. . . , 
The living are as blossoms and fruit on the tree, 
The dead are as lilies and wind on the marshes; 
The living are as cherries that bow to the morning 
Beckoning to the loitering stranger, 
The wind, to sing them his eerie ballads. 
The dead are as frozen skeleton branches 
Whereon the stillness perches like an owl. . . . 
The dead are as snows on the cherry orchard. 

1918 



106 



BAHAMA ISLANDS 

I 

ALL down the somnolent street where pale tinged houses 
dream 
The negroes go, black faces crowding together; 
And between the palm leaves dancing with lethargic ges- 
tures, 
The bright long water spreads, green as a parrot's wing — 
We have rest here and a monotony of wheels, 
A peaceful noise lilce bees that moan in June — 
And the sun rusts not, but his brazen heraldries 
Tarnished with evening are burnished with the dawn. 
Yet pain comes stabbing in the night with silver knife 

through the window, 
A blanched moon full of fear and the burden of desire — 
And nothing rids us utterly of grief. 
We who have pilgrim souls that will not sleep. 



II 

Moonlight planting the world with lilies, so hushed it seems 

and scented, 
But in the chapel is a droning where the negroes chant their 

hymns 
And we in aureoled loneliness go down the street contented. 
With hearts that beat for pleasure to the rhythm of our 

limbs. 

1917 



107 



THOUGHTS OF LONDON 

/^H, have I bartered and forgotten thee, 

^^ Selling thy tarnished twilights for gold sun, 

Relinquishing thy dreams that used to run 

A ragged troop along thy streets with me? 

Cast off the glitter of thy jewelry, 

Thy lamp-light, starlight, colours crudely spun, 

The eloquent ugliness, the roofs of dun, 

The fogs that swathe in bands of mystery? 

Mother of dreams and laughter and despair! 

Thy joy my Heaven is, my Hell thy pain. 

Thy labyrinthian streets wind everywhere. 

Thy sins and passions baffle me again; 

And all my hopes thy lamps that flick and glare, 

And all my griefs thy beggars in the rain. 

1918 



108 



STREETS 

1AM going 
Up and down the roads and alleys 
Through the forests of the city, 
Hunting thoughts, hunting dreams. 
My mind shall wander through the streets 
Whistling to a vague adventure, 
Plucking strange fancies where they lurk and peer 
And casting them away. 
Dusk is creeping through the town 
Lighting the lamps and loitering, 
Leaving smoky clouds of shadow, 
Hovering clouds of peace; 
And behind her race the winds 
Whining to the scent of darkness, 
Scattering the dust 
With their swift hounds' feet. . . . 
I am a hunter in the city's jungle. 
Exploring all her secret mysteries. 
I know her well. 
The moaning highways. 
And whispering alleys. 
The chimney-dishevelled roofs 
Where the moon walks delicately 
As a stray spectral cat; 
The little forlorn squares 
Where one tree stands 
Drooping bedraggled hair and fingers 
Over the benches where the people sit 
And stir not from their sullen postures, 
Staring out where evening passes 
With such a sauntering dreamy step. 
I know her parks that spring had decked with garlands, 
Fluttered with flags and child imaginings. 
Powdered with blossoms exquisite and shy, 
109 



Haunted with lovers and their last year's ghosts. 

Now stripped with autumn, as the ragpicker 

Wrapped in his tattered coat emaciate 

Picks up the littered wreck of holiday 

To mount the dust heap where our memories lie 

Sprawled in a mess of ruins. . . . 

I know her monotone of gloomy mansions, 

Repeating each in each a dull despair. 

Indifferent and dignified; 

Those tarnished prisons lined with white and gold, 

With dismal silences of velvet carpets. 

Where starving souls are kept 

Feeding upon each other's isolations, 

Not daring to escape. . . . 

Some roads seem steep as mountains, weary me 

With their crude temples built in praise of lust. 

Squatting and smiling at some hideous dream 

Of fat bejewelled goddesses, or gods 

Frock-coated, undismayed by prayers and tears, 

Their hats atilt like halos on their heads. ... 

I love the ribald multi-coloured crowd, 

Its radiant loves, and laughters, all the faces 

That are as songs, as flowers, as hovering Stardust. 

I love the memory-crusted taverns 

In which my heart has leapt to a fiddler's tune 

Until the dawn. 

Like a white minstrel stopped to sing 

Fantastic serenades, and called me forth 

Where through the crystal chandeliers of morning 

Dew-prismed shone the sun. . . . 

I love the narrow streets whose crippled houses 

Are bathed in vitriol twilights, 

Spitting smoke, 

Or making oaths and mouths at one another. . . . 

While between 

no 



The flaring tinsel lights of shop and window 

Are gaps of goblin darkness passaging 

Into Cimmerian depths of mystery and sin. . . . 

Wan children stare at me, and in their eyes 

I see the flickering pallor of the lamps, 

Reflective of the solitude of stars. . . . 

And I am thrilled 

With horror and the hope for tragedies. . . . 

But, they surround my heart these weary streets, 

Yea, in my soul they cut their mournful paths. 

And through them pass forever 

Those shadow figures trudging through the grey 

Like penitent souls through haunted corridors. . . , 

Ah, Grief, thou wanderer. 

Thou maker of music, lingering and sweet! 

Here dost thou pause to play thy shrill faint tunes, 

Thy fingers touch the stops to loose our tears, 

And shake our hearts, and fold our hands in prayer. 

Through all the winding mazes of the city 

Thy stooping shoulders and thy pitiful face are seen, 

And thou dost stand before the gate of brass, 

And by the iron door. 

Under the windows where we sit and wait 

For some sweet promise to unfold itself 

From the shut scrolls of sleep. 

And at the dusty curtain that divides 

Glory from Death, 

And lover from the lover. . . . 

Now In my room I sit 

And round me falls the darkness 

In rustling folds of peace. 

But round my heart I know 

No scarves of sleep and silence can be bound 

To shut the city out. 

Ill 



For I shall feel the rush of streets 

Shooting inquisitive fingers into chaos, 

Piercing the night's remote divinity. 

And I shall never rid me of these scars 

That time and man have cut into my thought, 

Never shake off my shoulders 

The burden of the city's pain. 

Oh, never shall we escape thee, 

Mother of mutiny and want, 

Thou beautiful mistress of Grief . . . 

Oh, never shall we escape thy insomnial nights 

Beating with ineloquent hands 

The tambourines of time, 

The drums of war; 

Fevering our minds 

With the swollen traffic of thoughts. 

The wheels and rattle of an endless search. . . . 

Tired I am with wandering, 

Pricked with the lights and jostled by the worlds, 
More jaded than the Moon, more hopeless, grey, 
Than that sad pilgrim lost amid the stars ! . . . 

1918 



112 



LAUGHTER and singing come with the morning, 
When Life doth mask his face with a gilded visor, 
And dons his arrogant clothes. 
But in the night, 

When the unsheathed moon stands naked and pale, 
We too put off our opulent disguise 
And stand alone in the baffling darkness, 
Fighting with our sins, 
Weeping for our loneliness, 
That moon-like gropes forever through the desolate air. 

1918 



"3 



IN the night I hear my loneliness calling 
The long shrill note of the seabird's cry- 
Over the fuming spite of breakers, * , 
Over the brumous, sulky tides. 
All the ocean is craving Heavenward, 
And the wild sky crushes downward toward the sea, 
Where the clouds stoop their passionate bodies, 
And the waves rear their supplicating hands. 
Mine eyes grow tired of looking outward forever, 
Away from the firelight and my sleeping idols, 
To where the darkness is shattered with gusts of white, 
Wings of ship, and bird, and cloud, and wave, 
Flashing their signals of unrest. — 
My longing is a warm thing in a cold street, 
Taking refuge by the chinks of lighted doors — 
My longing is a pale ghost stepping into the sunlight 
That falls in golden curtains sumptuous and hushed — 
My longing is a fiddler making a thin tune through the 

silence, 
Through the heavy pauses of sleep. — 
Ah ! Stop up my ears lest I hear my longing call, 
Lest I hear my loneliness crying I 

1918 



114 



SUNDAY 

HOW beautiful Is the world's delight, 
How trivial, yet as sweet as a passing dream 
That makes the harassed sleeper in the night 
Smile, and on waking sigh. Forever the stream 
Of time moves onward; as in coloured boats 
A thousand souls go sailing, 
And stilly down the tide my spirit floats 
Singing or wailing 

To the tune the waters make. Here we forget a space 
The crawling sins of man that sting and gloat, 
The pain and fear that baggers every face. 
But vaguely and remote 

The strident trumpet and the clamorous voices sound — 
Grief doth forget to curse her Gods or pray, 
While pagan follies squander all around 
Their brief gay hours in holiday; 
For all prayers die when laughter is on the lips. — 
How frail the moods of joy, how sweet to see them pass 
Like bubbles on the tide, like coloured ships 
Sailing on glass 1 

1918 



"5 



THE leaves are singing, and the sea, 
And the sand in the wind, 
Blown grass and hurrying people; 
Full of melodious strings and lutes and flutes 
Rustling and whispering forever. 
The sad music of Life is in my ears, 
Never ceasing, never asleep, 

And my heart is strung between chord and chord 
Like a crucifix in a rosary. 

1918 



116 



How soundly sleepeth the fool, 
With profane snore taunting the solemn-pillared 
night — 
He hath no dreams of restless, subtle forms 
That shift across a feverish vacancy; 
Nor doth he hear the drums of time 
Beating against oblivion tunes of war, 
Goading the crippled hours on their endless march — » 
But waketh to yawn in the face of the sun, 
Then turneth back to sleep. . . . 

How soundly the wise man sleepeth. 

Couched royally in the purple of the dark 

With his white mistress. Peace — 

And when the morning stealeth on his rest. 

As a rose he doth pluck her from the spreading tree of days. 

And reviveth his heart 

With the perfume of the world. . . . 

But 'twixt the wise and the foolish 

Many nights shed sorrow and fear. 

And nets are spread for timid feet, 

And the waves beat on the shifting sand. . . . 

1918 



117 



MOONLIT lilacs under the window, 
And the pale smell of their falling blossoms, 
And the white floating beams like luminous moths 
Fluttering from bloom to bloom. 
Sprays of lilac flowers 

Frothing at the green verge of midnight waves, 
Frozen to motionless icicles. 
Moonlight flows over me. 
Spreads her bright watery hair over my face, 
Full of illicit, marvellous perfumes 
Wreathed with syringa and plaited with hyacinths; 
Hair of the moonlight falling about me, 
Straight and cool as the drooping tresses of rain. 

1918 



118 



OLD woman forever sitting 
Alone in the large hotel under the fans, 
Infinitely alone where around you spin 
So many lives like painted tops, 
Smearing the void a moment with their hues, 
Giddily catching at balance as they pause. 
What crime was yours, old woman, 
What sin against the Earth 
That she should give you now 
A cap of dust and furrows on your cheeks. 
And at the end 
A hole dug in the mould? 
Is death the promise of Fate's last rebound. 
Revenge of Time that waits within the clock 
And laughs awry at life. 

For a kiss, for a dream, for a child that you bore. 
For a fresh rose pinned to your bosom? 
The owl is in your spirit. 

Blinking through the oldest tree of wisdom — 
And now your fingers are weaving 
The cold pale invisible blossoms of death 
Into a waxen wreath. 
And Time 

Sits down beside you knitting with quick hands 
Grey counterpanes to cover up a grave ! 

1918 



119 



LONELINESS I love, 
And that is why they have called me forth into the 

streets. 
Loneliness I love, 

But the crowd has clutched at me with fawning hands, . . . 
My spirit speaks 

In the scented quietness of a divine melancholy 
Murmuring the tunes 

For which my dreams are the delicate instruments. 
The shadowy silences 

Have made me beautiful and dressed me in velvet dignities, 
And that is why 
The noise of tambourines has maddened my soul into 

dancing, 
And I am clad 

In the lust-lipped whispering of furtive caresses. 
Holiness I love, 

And touching the virginal pierced feet of martyrs, 
The crucified feet 

Nestled among lilies and hallowing candles. 
Holiness I love 

And the melodious absolution falling on my sins. 
But that is why 

Blasphemous priests have forced my hands to tear 
The vesture of secrecy 
Which hides the human nakedness of God. 

H: * * 

I918 



120 



T MET an Indian underneath a tree, under a ragged tree, 

■■- His face was yellow and wrinkled like some stone 
whereon a God had writ 

And his emaciated fingers drew circles in the dust. ... 

I bent my mouth to his ear, crying "O father, O Prophet! 

I have wandered far over the earth troubled with doubts 
that will not let me rest, 

Canst thou not tell me with all thy wizardries and medita- 
tions 

The purpose of our lives upon this world. 

The secret truth Earth shelters In her womb?" 

But he was listening to the whispering of the mountains, 

To the boom of God's paces on the rocks, 

And the swishing steps of his followers in the rivers. 

Then suddenly he pointed to the arched doorway in be- 
tween the hills. 

And the mysterious purple curtain of the dusk that drooped 
from cliff to cliff. 

I saw In his eyes the vision of highborn ghosts, 

Of divine Ivory faces wreathed with the flowers of wis- 
dom — 

And I knew that he had found only the half-spoken prom- 
ises of Heaven, . . . 

* * * 

I saw a drunkard laughing In a tavern, 

His cup was tilted and the wine spilt crimson on the 
sprawled arms and distracted hair of a woman fallen 
asleep, 

I watched him there and wondered 

If ever the bubbling goblins of wine had whispered him 
life's secret. 

But he raised the cup of his carousals and gazed at empti- 
ness. 

Toasting some wild. Irreverent dream, 

121 



Some flame-red salamander pirouetting among the dead 
waste ashes of time — 

And I knew that he had found only the secrets of sleep. . . , 

* * * 

A woman sat within a little house, 
Scolding and singing ballads to her child, 
And all around came the quarrel of children's voices. 
Yet one boy sat apart within the furthest corner of the room 
Painting an animal with coloured chalks. 
I lingered by the fire thinking of life, its vanities and mys- 
teries, 
But the woman did not heed me. 
Nor her pale son that sat so hunched and still. 
Painting his visions with the broken chalks, 
For they had discovered the absorbing painful secrets of 

giving birth. . . . 

* * * 

It was evening as I wandered. 

By a lake two lovers leaned, smiling to see their faces in 

the water. 
For they had found within each other's souls 
An argent flattering mirror wherein to gaze and see their 

faces change with all the moods and shadows of the 

day. . . . 
Not here should I discover the answer to bring light into 

my darkness. 
Into the dim psychic crystals of my soul opalled with the 

changing colours of unrest — 
So I went away into the loneliness, asking the forests and the 

mountains and the sea 
The knowledge of life's bafiling mysteries. 
But they were roaring In a wind of memories. 
Gathering the rain into their bodies to make them fierce 

and strong, 
Heaving their shoulders upward to the morning. 
Crowning their foreheads with sunlight. 

122 



And I knew that they were Life Itself, 

The pushing vehemence that rushes from the strangling 

arms of Death, 
Nor could they guess 
The purpose of God's beauty in their joy. . . . 

1918 



123 



FROM the fathomless depth of my boredom, from the 
last room of Its emptiness, an elf has come to play 
with me. 

As comes a little gold spider to a prison cell teasing the 
criminal from his darkness to tear at a thread of sunlight, 
and kiss the mouth of a shy morning whispering through 
the window. 

An elf has come to dance with me, blown like a leaf on 
the path of my autumn lassitude. 

Sprightly one, dervish ! You are the living adventure 
born of my dead childhood, you are the small god In the 
temples of my unbelief, you are the bird that nests In ruined 
temples, laying your silver eggs by moonlight and singing 
when the pagan birds are still. 

You are the dream-sower In the fields of sleep, you have 
jingled the star-bells on the hood of darkness, and from the 
knarled, stark tree of time have flung me the apple of 
eternal laughter. 

1919 



124 



LOLLING in snow, like kings in ermine coats, the gilt- 
crowned bottles lie. . . . Our thoughts are dangled in 
a laughter of leaves as bunches of blue and yellow grapes 
for faery beggars, for ragged fancies to pluck and taste. 
Our music shall be the minstrelsy of ghostly ballad-mongers 
that have stolen from the ashen banquets of death to bless 
our revels. 

Our spirits shall flit like those winged faces of cherubs 
that never can alight, but swing forever on the azure ribbons 
of the sky. 

And all our dreams and kisses shall be as the rose-leaves 
falling on ancient festivals, as the shadows of rose-leaves 
falling on phantom lovers in the sleep-pillared temples of 
our first archaic passion. 

1918 



125 



THE roots of our longing are probing the heart of night, 
delving and twining together that our ultimate truth 
may grow out of the darkness that bewilders and nourishes. 
Out of the earth, the dust, the crystals of frost that bind 
themselves like a tight crown over our heads. 
Through the mould and the frost our hair and fingers shall 
prick their spears of pallor and flame, and in the green 
ardour of our up-rushing leaves the red goblets of fire 
shall open, and masses of white flowers, milky as the star- 
sprays that droop over Heaven, shall splash their bright 
foam from the darkness, as waves that rise and break into 
a fountain of blossoms. 

1919 



126 



VAHDAH 

SUN-AUREOLED lilies are your priestesses, 
They stand like choirs in silver surplices, 
Melodious streams of silence fill the room. 
And pensive listeners lean within the gloom 
Of purple quietness. A laughter full of holiness — 
Like the wild bells of lilies ringing in the loneliness 
Of star-reflected gardens walled with night, — 
Thrills from your soul which empties its delight 
As rain on lilies, or as sunlight falling slenderly 
To gild their ivory temples, and as moonlight shutting 

tenderly 
Their alabaster doors. ... A white peace grows. 
And love, within your spirit like a lily and a rose. 

1918 



127 



STARLIT silences! 
Breeding fears, swarming with sudden deaths, 
With separations, burdens, and despairs, 
Weaving slow eerie fancies in my brain . . . 
Forlorn shorn monks go down the cloisters of quietness 
With tortured crucifixes cut in ivory 
Clasped in their praying hands. 
And psalmed with lips renunciate of kisses . . . 
Forgotten days are painted on the night 
In parables and symbols of remorse 
That jeer from out the wind-stirred tapestries. 
The hangman's rope coils upward like a snake 
Out of the death-coloured waters, 
While the black barges pass 
Funereal, 

Carrying doom from mist to mist. . . . 
And madmen steal about the wintry parks 
Under the high glum walls of an asylum. 
With eyes lit up in phosphorescent ecstasies, 
With fumbling hands 
That grope for things invisibly obscene. 
Even the clock 

Grown idiot too from keeping madmen's time 
Gibbers the hours away in irrelevant chimes. . . . 
Silence embalms the dead with scented bands 
And is the watchman to deserted houses. 
And draws the violet curtain on the day. 
And fits a mask of silver to the moon. 
Silence brings corpses from the crypts of memory 
And sits them round us in the empty chairs, 
Opens the secret chambers of our hopes 
And shows us there in awful pantomime 
Lust wreathing love with poppies and with ashes, 
And Beauty dressing Sin for carnival, 
And Peace made drunken with a cup of blood. 
It winds as ivy round our listening thoughts 
128 



Shutting all sounds away, enclosing us 
Within its stifled virid twilight. . . . 

Cry out, sing, make noises, 

Bacchantes, revellers, clowns! 

Bring myriad lamps in clusters, likening grapes 

That spill the wine of light into our gloom; 

Pressing against our lips 

The red grape-kisses of pleasure. 

Bring the hounds. 

The garlanded white ones, 

To bay and snarl and tear the flying rags 

Of stillness shadowing away! 

Lean over me, O Life, 

And whisper all thy lying flatteries 

That drag me back from Silence and her dead. 

I have kept vigil on my soul too long 

Within this vast cathedral of dim sleep. 

Languidly gathering 

The cold grey lilies of the stars 

To slip between her passive waxen hands. . s » 

1918 



129 



THE mountain is an Emperor. 
The clouds are his beard, and the stars his diadem; 
His bauble is the moon; 

He is dressed in silver forests, and the mist his train; 
His feet are two white rivers. 



1917 



130 



I KNOW what happiness is — 
It is the negation of thought, 
The shutting off 

Of all those brooding phantoms that surround 
As dank trees in a forest 
Cutting the daylight into rags. 
Caging the sun 
In rusted prison bars. 
Happiness loves to lie at a river's edge 
And make no song, 

But listen to the water's murmuring wisdom. 
The kissing touch of leaves wind-bowed together, 
The feathery swish of cloud wings on a hill; 
Opening wide the violet-petalled doors 
Of every shy and cloistered sense, 
That all the scent and music of the world 
May rush into the soul. 
And happiness expands 

The rainbow arch for a procession of dreams, 
For moth-like fancies winged with evening, 
For dove-breasted silences, 
For shadowy reveries 
And starry pilgrims. ... 
I know what happiness is — 
It is the giving back to Earth 
Of all our furtive thefts. 
The lurid jewels that we stole away 
From passion, sin and pain. 
Because they glittered strangely, luring us 
With their forbidden beauty. 
Because our childish fingers curiously 
Crave the pale secrets of the moon 
And grope for dangerous toys. 
Happiness comes in giving back to Earth 
The things we took from her with violent hands, 
Remembering only 

131 



That her dust is our garment, 

Her fruits our endeavour, 

Her waters our priestess. 

Her leaves our interpreters to God, 

Her hills our infinite patience. 

1918 



132 



LONG hath the pen lain idle in my hand, 
Or traced slow sentences without a rhyme, 
Words strung at random to beguile the time 
As children threading beads upon a strand. 
I have strayed far away from fairyland 
Whose little hills grow steep and hard to climb; 
I creep along the valleys in the slime, 
Or hide me like an ostrich in the sand. 

For I have sought a mellow idleness. 
To be forever buried as a fly 
Lies casketed in amber; where the stress 
Of peril, hunger. Death can never cry 
To wake me from my sanguine weariness. 
Or cloud the lucid stillness with a sigh. 

1918 



133 



1 



I LAID my heart on a stone 
And stood in the wood to watch. 
Presently a priest came by; 
He hid it in his cowl 
And buried it in the graveyard. 
Now is it grown into a cyclamen tree, 
Clustering over the wall, 
Beckoning far along the twilight road; 
Nodding and singing where the cypress moans, 
Ringing its little bells while the great bell tolls. 
Whiter than ghosts are its flowers, 
And its scent is sweeter than ghostly music — 
All the men and priests that pass 
In the night when the stars lean down. 
Smell the heavy fragrance there 
And feel the gentle touch of dripping dew. 
Then they cross themselves and go 
Hurriedly, warily. 
Dreaming of pale women, 
Under the pale stars. 

1918 



134 



THE cold light steals into my soul 
Revealing its emptiness, 
The cold winds batter at my heart 
And make its lonely tenant shake with fear — 
The raindrops slide across the window-glass 
Like sighs that fall from patient weariness; 
And coldly smiling time 

Peers with his clock-face, ticking in my brain 
The pulse of a monotonous remorse. 

1918 



ns 



THE caravans of spring are in the town, 
Lighting their brilliant torches in the park, 
Dangling their bells, engirdling each stark 
Black tree with coloured rings. The houses frown 
Against the beryl sky, yet wear a crown 
Of hazy dream, or flash a golden spark 
Of sun-fire in their windows glum and dark; 
The people blow like petals up and down. 

But London tires at evening, each grey street 
Mourns as the slow procession passes by, 
Traflic and crowd, and Time on loitering feet. 
Spring droops his lute, the slender echoes sigh, 
And wistfully the jaded revellers meet, 
Their pomp in tatters and their wreaths awry. 

1918 



136 



I DREAD the beauty of approaching spring 
Now the old month is dead and the young moon 
Has pierced my heart with her sharp silver horns. 
My tired soul is startled out of sleep 
By all the urging joy of bud and leaf, 
And in the barren yard where I have paced 
Content with prison and despair's monotony, 
The trees break into music wild and shrill, 
And flowers come out like stars amid the dust, 
Bewildering my loneliness with beauty. . . . 
For winter with her melancholy face 
Shone back my miseries as in a glass, 
And wept and whined in harmony with me; 
And I could listen by the withering ashes 
To the ill-omened drum of dropping rain. 
And sighing barken sighs and mute feel silence. 
And cold stretch forth my hand into the snows, 
And hating, hear the laughter of the wind 
Whose mad hands tear the sky. 
But now again the promise of the spring 
Shall lift my martyred spirit from the dust. 
To where the lilied altar shines with peace, 
And the white priestess comes 
Crowning each candle with a gold desire 
Engirdling with pallors 
The forehead of a divine ghost. 
Ah, but they die, these gods, the candles dwindle 
And spring is but a radiant beckoning 
To death that follows slowly, silently. . . . 

O flitting swallows, fleeting laugh of wind, 

O flash of silver In the wings of dawn 

That are spread out and closed. O hush of night 

Breathless with love, oh swish of whispering tide 

That swells and shrinks upon the dreaming shore. 

O gentle eyes of children wonder-wide 

137 



That grow too soon to weariness and close; 

O scuttling run of rabbit on the hills, 

And flight of lazy rooks above the elm; 

O birds' eggs frail, tinged faintly, nestled close, 

And mystery of flower in the bud. 

O burning galaxy of buttercups, 

And drone of bees above the pouting rose, — 

twilit lovers stilled with reverie 

And footprints of them swerving on the sand 
And darkness of them clasped against the sky I 

1 see beyond the glory of your days 

The grey days marching one behind the other 

To the bleak tunes of silence. 

"When mists shall smear the radiance of the moon 

And the lean thief shall pass, 

Snatching the glittering toys away from love, 

Plucking the feathers from the wings of peace. 

And Life herself, grown old and crooked now. 

Shall go the way that her long shadow points, 

Her long black shadow down the roads of sleep. 

1918 



138 



TO MY FATHER 

I CANNOT think that you have gone away, 
You loved the earth — and Hfe lit up your eyes, 
And flickered in your smile that would surmise 
Death as a song, a poem, or a play. 
You were reborn afresh with every day, 
And bafiled fortune in some new disguise. 
Ah! can it perish when the body dies, 
Such youth, such love, such passion to be gay? 

We shall not see you come to us and leave 
A conqueror — nor catch on fairy wing 
Some slender fancy — nor new wonders weave 
Upon the loom of your imagining. 
The world is wearier, grown dark to grieve 
Her child that was a pilgrim and a king. 

1917 



139 



TO MY MOTHER 

AT evening when the twilight curtains fall, 
Before the lamps are lit within my room, 
My memories hang bright upon the gloom. 
Like ancient frescoes painted on the wall. 

And I can hear the call of birds and bells 
And shadowy sound of waves, and wind through leaves 
And wind that rustles through the burnished sheaves, 
And far off voices whispering farewells. 

I dream again the joy I used to know 
While straying by the sea that hardly sighed 
A sorrow in my singing, as the tide 
Crept up to clasp me, smiled, and let me go. 

And I remember all the glad lost hours, 
The racing of brown rabbits on the hill. 
The winds that prowled around the lonely mill, 
Laburnum laughter, music of the flowers. 

The berries plucked with loitering delight, 
Staining the dusk with purple, till the thought 
Of starry little ghosts behind us caught 
Our hearts and made us fearful of the night. 

The London evenings huddled In the rain 
Whose misty prisms shone with lamplight pale, 
Making our hearts seem sinister and frail, 
Fainting our thoughts with mystery and pain. 

I have a world of memories to dream, 
To touch with loving fingers as a sigh 
Revives a little flame and lets it die. 
Ah, were the days as lovely as they seem 
140 



Now that they look so peaceful lying dead? 
And is it all the hope of Joy we have, 
The broken trophies of the things she gave 
And took away to give us dreams instead? 

The things we love and lose before we find 
The way to love them well enough and keep, 
That now are woven on the looms of sleep 
That now are only music of the wind. 

1918 



141 



LONDON grows sad at evening, 
And we at the windows sit 
To watch her moods, 
Wearying with her. 

Even a noise of laughter from the street 
Sounds in our ears 

Like something dropped and shattered on the stone. 
Then her musician comes, 
A wandering, malicious spirit; 
The organ grinder, playing those old tunes 
We know too well. 
That hurt us with fatigue. 
Till Hope like a harlequin, 
His glitter hidden in a ragged coat, 
The lamplighter, goes by. 
Planting his pale flames in the dusk. 

1918 



142 



AH! the spring, 
Sudden, surprising, 
Melting the iron scales around the heart 
As the earliest sun 

Melts the cold case of dew on leaves — 
Ah I the streets like odorous rivers 
Chanting the echoes of seas — 
Ah! the flowers in shop-windows 
Beseeching, persuasive. 
Reluctant to let their beauty flow away 
From thoughts that mirror them in passing — t 
Beautiful exiles 
Fluttering in their chains, 
Thrilled with the noise of bees, 
The music of meadows 
Still hovering around them — 
Flower fingers, flower-touches, 
Passional, reminiscent, 
Ripphng the soul's still waters — 
Flower galaxies. 

Enamelled bridges arching from dream to dream, 
Garlands splashing over the eyes of satyrs. 
The furtive woodland eyes. 
The pointed inquisitive ears — 
Pallid flowers foaming on hill-crests, 
Gushing heavenwards 
From a sea of stormy mountains — 
Opening and shutting exquisite doors, 
As the senses open to music. 
Shut upon silence, 
Open to beauty. 

Close their caskets upon love — 
Ah! the flowers in the windows, 
Amorous of poets 
Making a chaplet of song! 
1919 
143 



THE UNDERTONE OF THE VOLGA BOAT SONG 

OGod, 
We have nothing to give Thee, 
We are as fog that drifts on the river, 
As the wailing of voices blown through mist — * 
We are as those that carry bags of dust 
Heaping them with the dust — 
We are covered with the dust of days, 
We are pale from the dust of dreamless nights 
Shaken before we were rested — 
At dawn we are found by the sun 
Adrift, labouring, thinking of nothing — 
Our wine is bitter, it has made us drunk, 
Our bread is coarse, 

We are always athirst and hungry. . . . 
O God, we have been patient. 
We have grown old in weariness. 
Our lives are as the labouring of the wind — > 
We are huddled together in the dawn, 
The sleeping houses pass us, 
The dawn is a field of nettles 
Stinging us from rest. . . . 
O God, 

We have nothing to give Thee but patience, 
We have suffered evil and beheved Thee good. 
Thy face is the gentleness of the distance, 
The river is placid with the thought of Thee — 
Our tears have washed us harder than the rocks, 
And like the rocks we wait, 
Grow old with waiting. . . . 
Weariness, the river 
Flowing through banks of sleep. . . . 
O God, we have nothing to give Thee, 
Take our great weariness, 
We that have never lived and never slept, 
Take our long weariness, O God! . . . 
1919 
144 



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